Strange Icons Appearing

Hi! Good to have the forum back! My wife’s home computer became infected by the several viruses, one being NimdaA. It had NAV but it was not updated and wasn’t run on a regular basis (a long story). It has since been updated, and all infected files were presumably deleted (There were at least 1500 infected files, mostly .eml files), the quarantined files were removed, and all subsequent NAV scans show no infected files.

The problem is that the icons that you click to minimize, maximize, and close a window, as well as the arrows you click on scroll bars, all are replaced by random graphics. Sometimes they are colorful patterns, other times identifiable portions of other icons. They are present each morning when I look to see if the scheduled NAV scan ran. The icons return to normal on reboot, but change to their corrupted state sometime during the night. Since the only event that runs at night is a NAV scan, I presume it is the catalyst that causes the change. (I believe there were some NAV files that were infected originally).

Microsoft’s knowledge base had two articles I thought might apply. One (Q133733) says to rename the ShellIconCache file and reboot to have it rebuild itself. But that file does not seem to exist on this computer!? And I would expect that the icons would be corrupt all the time, not just sometimes, if it was this file that was bad. The other article (Q1232668) suggests using regedit to "add the Max Cached Icons string value with a value of 500 to the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorerâ€. However, it does not give instructions to do so.

Has anyone ever seen this type of behavior? Any suggestions? I really want to avoid re-formatting and reloading software.

 

Is it possible that you have a screensaver set to come on automaticly ?

They will cause all kinds of strange thing to happen.

 

No, actually, I changed that to "none" a few days ago. The monitor does go black if left inactive for a long period, but I think this is a feature of the monitor itself.

 

The monitor does go black if left inactive for a long period, but I think this is a feature of the monitor itself.

That could be the problem with the Icons. I had a similiar thing happen when I was letting the Monitor shut down. When I would move the mouse or hit a key to bring it back the colors etc. would be messed up.

The Mointor itself does not do that. It is a setting in the Power Management in the Control Panel. You might try working with the various settings there.

Due to various problems, I have mine set to never shutdown anything.

BillyBob

 

I suppose that could be. Seems to me though that the virus corrupted some system file that controls the appearance of these icons, or planted a program that does so when the power management feature blanks out the monitor or when NAV scans the entire drive. I did try to dupicate the event by running a NAV scan on the Windows directory, but the icons remained normal. In any case, I'll check that out this evening.

 

trndad--This might solve your problem in Win95. Do not know about other versions of Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q134861

 

Thanks, I'll check that also. I also ran across a post at Symantec.com from someone with a very similar problem. Symantec identified it as the W32.Magistr.24876@mm virus. It makes changes to NAV and other files so it can't be found by a NAV scan, and displays similar behavior. I'll post back tommorrow with the outcome.

 

Thanks, I'll check that also. I also ran across a post at Symantec.com from someone with a very similar problem. Symantec identified it as the W32.Magistr.24876@mm virus. It makes changes to NAV and other files so it can't be found by a NAV scan, and displays similar behavior. I'll post back tommorrow with the outcome.

 

Last night I ran the free on-line virus checker at http://security1.symantec.com. It did not find any viruses. I found a reference in their knowledge base to using the Windows System File Checker to identify missing or currupt system files. I ran it (Start-Run-SFC) and it found one currupt file, C:\Windows\System\Setupx.dll. I restored the file from the Win98 cab files. I then turned off the power management feature which had been set to black out the monitor after 30 minutes of inactivity. I also set a screen saver to run after 5 minutes.

This morning I checked it and all appears normal. No more strange icons! NAV had run during the night as usual. I'm not sure which of the above did the trick, but it appears to be acting fine now.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Hope this post helps someone else with similar troubles!