Postscript:
Despite my friend's certain belief that they mistyped the location they wanted to save in and four separate malware tools (Symantec Endpoint, malwarebytes, super anti-spyware, and Ad-aware) all indicating a clean system, I'm now not so sure, green granite.
Today came the observation that Symantec's Network Threat Protection was disabled and wouldn't re-enable. The message given was "signature files out of date". Indeed they were, which was odd as the machine is set up to use Live Update. A manual Live Update failed to reach Symantec though, which wasn't correct as my laptop reached the Live Update address perfectly when I tried in parallel. I directed Matey to the hosts file but nothing dodgy was in there to cause a redirect or a block. Hmmmm.
Pondering about this, I received a call to say that Symantec AV tamper protection had just been triggered whilst the machine was unattended.
"Enough" cried I, and directed how to restore to the system image that was taken a week ago. Success. Easy peasy, and all is now cushty again. Thank heavens that at least some of my friends listen to advice (take a regular system image, in this case) and hopefully I now have an evangelist to help promote the worth of this to others!
