Display properties [damaged by a virus]

Hello there,

A couple of days ago I downloaded something, but it turned out to be a trojan or virus or something. What happened was it changed my desktop background picture to a BSOD image saying something about a trojan infection, and I couldnt change my background picture - when I went to display properties there was only two tabs there: screensaver and settings.

So I used Microsoft anti spyware and kaspersky anti virus and they got rid of some things, and I also managed to find the background picture and deleted that also so now my background is just black, but I still can't change anything.

I went to http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm and used the "Restore All Display tabs" registry fix thing there and it worked, enabling all the tabs in display properties that were diabled again, BUT I STILL can't change my desktop background image. I can click on the tab for it now and I can see the list of images and the browse button etc, but everything is grayed out and i can't click on it.

So I went into regedit , hkey_current_user, software, microsoft, windows, currentversion, policies, activedesktop to see if i could change the NoChangingWallPaper value, but it is already set to 0!

I am running XP Professional.

Also, when I try to change it by going into Paint it says that I must save the file before making it the background, even though it is already saved!

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is very frustrating.

 

Have you tried turning off active desktop? Display Properties>Desktop tab>Customize Desktop button>Web tab, uncheck everything in the Web Pages field. You can delete everything there except My Current Home Page, which should be unchecked. Also uncheck "Lock Desktop Items. "

 

Active Desktop is already turned off and the My Current Homepage option is already unchecked. Turning it on and then off again does nothing. Lock desktop items is also unchecked.

 

There is another location in the registry you may need to look. Under HKCU it only applies to the current user, under HKLM it applies to all users.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies

 

Could be a system file problem. Try sfc /scannow under run. Also try the Spyware removal program called AdAware.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, but the problem is still there.

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies there isn't any tab or value for active desktop for me to change, and i ran sfc /scannow and it ran fine and no messages came up or anything so i guess that means everything is fine there.

I might just reinstall XP although I'd rather not have to ...

 

Have you tried system restore?

 

The earliest system restore I can use is after it happened, so no