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Category : Windows 95 & 98

Question : this pc has some viruses. used an online service and it cleaned them but when i booted up pc today received this error message, "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SCANREG.VBS" failed
what does this mean.

Answer : That, very likely, was the virus itself, which has now been cleaned. A VBS file is a Visual Basic Script, and would be very unlikely to be a real program that would be setup for autorun at boot-time. Naming it after scanreg.exe was also a way to attempt to hide it's presence. You can safely ignore the message or remve the entry that loads it (preferable). To remove it do this:

Start/Run/Regedit.exe (hit ENTER)

Press CTRL-F to do a search and then type in SCANREG.VBS and hit ENTER. When (if) it finds the entry ensure that the path at the left is something like:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run

If it is select the entry that has the VBS file on the right and press DEL to erase it. Do another search for it and ensure it's nowhere else. There is no need to save when you're done - just quit the program.

If you didn't find it there then it's loading from one of two other places:

Start/Programs/Startup (folder)

OR

C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI
(use Start/Run/notepad c:\windows\win.ini <ENTER> to get at this file)
Near the top will be two lines starting with "run=" and "load=" - one of them would have the SCANREG.VBS file to the right. If so delete the part to the right of the equals sign and save the file.

--
Paul Doherty
http://members.home.net/iqueue
DOS/Windows Utilities

P.S. The virus you had is likely called "VBS/Stages" for future reference. A good resource for virus info is Symantec's Antivirus Research Center (SARC) at http://www.sarc.com

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