Blue screen - Hijacker?

[rjc7394]

I ran ran Pest Patrol and it found a hijacker called "Peopleonpage.apropos; 6/20/2005" or something like that. I quarantined it, ran Pest Patrol again and the hijacker showed up again. Pest Patrol told me it could take an iteration and reboot to get rid of the hijacker. I rebooted and got the blue screen of death even in Safe Mode. What has happened? Is this related to hijacker?

I use my PC a lot. I haven't added any new hardware. I don't get any error messages on the blue screen (just the WINDOWS logo). My hard drive (Maxtor) is less than 8 mths old. I use The latest version of Firefox browser, XP Firewall active, run Spybot/AVG a few times a day and Pest Patrol a few times a week with no problems.

Running XP SP2.

[glc]

http://www.spywaredb.com/remove-peopleonpage-apropos/

You should probably consider a wipe and reinstall. If you have files you need to recover, remove the drive and slave it into another PROTECTED computer to get them off.

[rjc7394]

"Restore PC to previous time" didn't help either. Can I get rid of these hijacker files thru command prompt (I don't know much about computers). And can any of the files (mostly video/audio files) I transfer to a protected hard drive possibly be infected? Thanks a lot.

[glc]

1. Yes, one at a time, using proper DOS syntax.
2. Yes.

You do not know what you are up against with that trojan. Even if you can remove it and get it working right again, you don't know what info has already been compromised.

[rjc7394]

How do I transfer files from the infected drive to the protected drive? BIOS recognizes the Master (uninfected) and Slave (infected) hard drives but Windows only recognizes one Crive (uninfected drive). How do I access the Slave drive? (Couldn't find any Google references.)

[glc]

Right click on My Computer, Manage. Open Disk Management. A wizard should pop up for importing the media.

[rjc7394]

I got it to recognize both drives.
1. How do I make sure I don't get this hijacker again?
2. And how come when I quarantined the hijacker in Pest Patrol the malware executed?
3. I searched for the malware (apropos_client_loader.exe) on the infected drive and it didn't show up!

I was trying to figure out a way I can access the command prompt for the slave drive so I can try to delete the malware

Thanks a million. I don't have money for a new OS.

[glc]

What drive letter is it now? Just open a command prompt and change to that letter. Say it's F. Just type F:\ and hit enter.