About a month back, a nice lady called and said her computer had something called: "Antivirus Professional 2010" warning her that she had several infections and if she would be kind enough to send them here C.C. info, they'd bill it and get rid of the nasties. She was running Win XP SP3, Firefox, AVG Free, Spyware Doctor, and Spyware Search & Destroy. The computer was badly crippled when it showed up at my office. Trying to bring up most any web page would re-direct the browser to pages offering to rid the computer of the infection. Task manager was disabled so you couldn't terminate processes, the desktop was missing most of the usual icons and the wall paper was replaced by one that warned of impending doom from infections if they weren't removed by sending $$$. I was unable to use the registry editor to get rid of processes and some of the files were so protected that even using KillBox, wasn't effective. This one nearly had me licked. I spent two full days before I got it cleaned, and had I not found a free miracle program, I'd have ended up re-formatting and doing a clean install.

So today, another one showed up. Pretty much the same set of free programs, only AVG had been replaced by Avast. The infection of choice this time, was something called "Security Tools". Other than the change of name, the behavior was pretty much the same as the one previously mentioned. Having been burned by the great number of un-billed hours I spent on the AVG protected computer, I told this lady that a re-format and re-install was going to cost her a couple hundred bucks. She'll get away cheaper than that though because my miracle program looks like it worked again. I'll install Microsoft Security Essnetials for her and probably put MS Windows Defender on it also.

Free advise -- worth what you paid for it?