Uninvited items on desktop
 

Mysterious things happening with my desktop. Strange icons suddenly appeared, names like

1. key3, cert8, secmod , all of which when opened come up with the following:

You are attempting to open a file of type Database file (.db). These files are used by the operating system and by various programs. Editing or modifying them could damage your system.

2. xpti, formhistory,compreg and others, which come up with:

You are attampting to open a file of Dat file (.dat)

Plus a few others, (.rdf, notepad files etc), all of which promise doom defeat and despair if I attempt to open them, plus a few types that Windows cannot open and ask what association to open them with.

At the same time Mozilla Firefox lost all cookies, bookmarks etc. I deleted all the files from the desktop, uninstalled Firefox, and re-installed it (twice). Each time after re-installation the same icons appeared on my desktop.

Virus scan is clean, Spybot/Adaware/Ccleaner have all been run to no effect. HijackThis log appears clean (to me), I can’t detect any other adverse influences on the computer at this stage.

Any ideas?
:confused: :confused:

Presuming that it is Firefox that is saving stuff to you desktop, go into Tools->Options->Downloads and set the download folder to something else, i.e. a new folder you create. I'm just clutching at straws here as I'm not a Firefox expert, but that is where it saves stuff on my Linux machine.

Regards
Stoney

My daughter had similar problems. She surfs all over the net and being a teenager thinks that there is no problem signing up for all sorts of sites.

Some programmes, effectively trojans, put themselves into the restore part of WinXP. Adaware / antivirus software may not look in there so even is a lot of this stuff is found on the hard drive and deleted, the problem comes back on each re-boot.

Turn off the system restore points (Start, Control Panel, System, System Restore - put tick in box to turn it off).

Run your adaware / spyware / antivirus software and delete / quarantine as required.

Reboot and hopefully the problem is sorted.

As a double check I would then check again that the restore part is actually switched off.