In all my years surfing the internet, I've never gotten infected with what my laptop got infected with last night.

What basically happened was my fiance was "getting a file" for me and once it downloaded, she tried to open it, and she got a message saying something about "Spyware detected". She didn't try to find it before rebooting the computer, so I don't know what the restart did.

Now, I've had several viruses before. I generally just do a system restore since I always have backups of important things anyway.

But this thing I got last night has thrown me for a loop. First off, when I boot XP, nothing shows except the background and the mouse pointer. No icons, no taskbar, nothing. Try to run task manager, nope as "Task Manager has been disabled by administrator".

So when I got to work this morning (couldn't use my computer at home obviously), I went looking around Google and apparently this is a common virus people get.

I've been compiling information on possible solutions all morning, since I won't be able to get back on the net if one thing doesn't work. I've gotten a lot of information as to what kinds of things I can do during pre-boot and in safe mode, so I'll be trying those things out tonight when I get home.

During my research, I had a "duh" moment. Even though I had the system restore disc in the cd try, the computer wouldn't boot from the disc. I forgot to check the BIOS and make sure it tried to boot from cd first, then hard drive. The last time I did one though, I don't remember having to change this configuration, so that may be another bridge I have to cross.

I just wanted to ask if anyone here has experienced this virus, and if so, how did you ultimately get your computer back to normal? I was so frustrated last night, I almost went out and bought a brand new laptop (which I may still end up doing anyway), but I still want to get this one fixed as I had planned to upgrade the hd and ram.