Error: This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive ....

If anyone can help me with this problem I'd be very grateful.... I'm running Windows ME and I just downloaded the latest version of Spywareblaster (3.3). But when I try and run the program I get the following error message:

"This program has been damaged, possibly by a bad sector of the hard drive or a virus. Please reinstall it."

I already know what is causing the problem - its spyware like coolwebsearch that is downloading harmful files and damaging certain registry keys on my computer. I've looked at other posts on this site and they seemed very helpful for XP users to try and find these damaged keys and ridding their computers of this aweful plague. The problem is I'm using ME and certain registry addresses they have suggested looking at don't exist on my machine.

Of couse I have run all the different anti-virus programs but they are all coming up clean and I don't see any offending files in my system folders. I think this problem is deep in the registry files. I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem on a WindowsME or 98 machine and could you please tell me how you solved this problem. Thanks!

 

Hi Matt_353.

Welcome to Wilders.

Take a look here,

http://www.javacoolsoftware.info/kb/idx/7/007/article/

Specifically the second resolution.

Hope this helps.


snowbound

 

Thanks I was aware of that assistance before. I don't think it would have helped much though because Hijackthis was coming up clean. But I did fix managed to fix the problem. I went to the Panda ActiveScan site and did the online system scan and it cleared up the problem, something that all my anti-virus programs failed to do.

Turns out I had a rather nasty virus called Parite.B aka the Pinf virus. Supposedly it slowly infects .exe files over a long period of time. Anyway, this online scanner seemed to do the trick, so if anyone else out there has a similar problem that scan might be a possibly solution. Thanks!