Any chance anyone in Tumblrland can help me? I’m having a serious IT problem and I’ve exhausted all my options.
I seem to have downloaded a virus - I’m not sure how - no new installs, just updates to known programs like Chrome, Steam and Dragon Age: Inquisition. I haven’t acquired any suspicious new files either - they have been checked thoroughly.
My specs: Windows 8.1, Google Chrome (ask if you need more), Windows Defender (that might seem lacking, but it’s never failed me before. Ever.)
Here are the issues (they number greatly):
- I can’t open Task Manager. It closes the moment I open it, I can't even see what programs are running in the brief second before that happens.
- I can't open regedit. Same deal as Task Manager.
- I can't access anything that accesses Task Manager and/or regedit, like CCleaner.
- My virus scanners are picking up nothing.
- Chrome constantly logs me out of my Google account every time I restart.
- Some webpages (seemingly random ones, like Google forums, an instance of Tumblr and another forum for virus removal) crashed Chrome. I was unable to start the session again, but I was able to open a new window and/or a new incognito window.
What I have tried:
- Cmd still works (though it will not give me any information as to why task manager or regedit are closing when I run them via it)
- I used cmd to restore permissions to both task manager and regedit, to no avial. The only difference was that they each stayed open for a couple of extra milliseconds.
- I checked all my connections (inbound, outbound etc.), nothing seemed suspicious.
- I went through my event log and couldn't find anything solidly weird, though tons of seemingly random events happened on the 20th (more than any other day from what I could tell).
- I manually reset permissions on CCleaner, task manager and regedit and when I was allowed access (very rarely), it changed nothing.
- I ran a system file checker on cmd, and it told me it could only deal with "some" corrupted files, gave me a log file, but I can't make heads or tails of it tbh so I don't know.
- I’ve run Microsoft’s Safety Scanner and they came up clean.
This seems to be a vaguely common thing according to forums, but every fix I've found either hasn't worked, or it's a "once the virus is gone..." fix, which clearly doesn't help me.
:( Any thoughts?
