Infected.. but with what?

[mrlucio]

hello, I am workin on a pc which was infected two months ago. The owner turned it off because it would just keep on rebooting. So now I am working on the computer. Its wierd, takes a long time to boot up and when you look at the services only about 3 out of all the automatic services have started. And if i try to start the services, it fails.... dunno I am lost, where should I start?

[ogrerocks]

How do you know it was infected?
What services are you trying to run? Technically, it's only needs, 'System Idle Process', 'System', explorer.exe, and a svchost.exe or two to run smoothly.

[mrlucio]

alright, slaved the drive to my pc and ran a virus scan. I found the gaobot virus on it and removed. Put the drive in the original computer and booted it up. It logs automatically into the owner account and it give me a desktop which is useless. it has no start button and to browse around the pc I have to hit ctrl-alt-del and run everything in the task manager. And a bunch of the main services are not starting. I cant even go it the properties of the services to enable them. What da dilly.. This is Windows XP home edition.....

[mrlucio]

alright i see what the problem is. RPC is disabled and a lot of services are depending on this. i run services.msc and try to go into the properties of RPC, but it does nothing. Is there a way to enable this service using the command prompt...