"Scareware"! Spyware Protect 2009, sysguard.exe

I completely agree! Restore will get the machine running, but then one needs to run several scans, preferably with more than one virus checker. After my son cleared his machine and got it to boot and function, he began the scanning process. No word yet on what he found.

BTW: his wife does a lot of volunteer work for charity, and she was browsing various sites in their area by first doing a google search. She was clicking the sites from the google list, and one of them popped that ransom wear msg.

It appeared to her as an ordinary Microsoft XP Pro Windows msg box. Nothing unusual, but it warned her that her machine had a virus. Knowing better than to accept the msg, she tried to close it.

That's when things went to hell. She yelled for hubby [my son] who came from the other room, looked at the screen, and muttered, "Uh oh. "

 

A small tip, it's not infallible but when presented with popups like this use the Red X in the top right corner (that's generated by your OS), a close/cancel button in your browser is generated by the website and "Cancel" can easily be transposed to "OK ".

As I said it's not guaranteed to work but if you ever stumble on such popups it's a good first choice.