vtek

hi, and thanks for your reply and welcome.

unfortunately, it looks as though my problem is more serious than i had previously thought. i cannot access either this forum or bleepingcomputer from my infected computer; i simply get an offline error saying that the site is down or i am not connected to the internet or somesuch. so i thought i could get around that by using the laptop provided through my work (as i am doing now) to download the required files, transfer them to my infected computer with a usb key and follow the instructions here. however, my infected computer will not run combofix at all. i checked to make sure i copied the whole file and not just a shortcut to my desktop, but it was not. i even tried running it through start -->run... but that failed too. so now i don't know what to do because to even apply the solution i need to find a solution first.

and as a confirmation of the fact that something fishy is going on, i managed to change my internet security settings such that my internet explorer could properly display all web content (it still couldn't access this site, though). it worked great for a couple of days, but when i decided to shut my computer down for the night one night, when i started it up again the settings were once again f***ed up and now, for the life of me, i can't make them normal again.

i appreciate the attempts to help, and if any more information is required, i would be happy to provide whatever i can.