Something Strangling my Mom's Hard Drive

Ever since I ran a full scan a few days ago with the Kaspersky Rescue Disk on my Mom's laptop, it has been running very slowly. I don't think it was from the Rescue Disk, since it found nothing.

It is a few year old Compaq laptop, with a Pentium Dual-Core, 3GB of RAM, and a Samsung HDD. I ran a test on the memory and HDD, and they both were fine.

It takes a while after logging in just for Avast! and OA free to load, and a while longer to be able to do anything.

I checked resource monitor after I finally got it to load. The disk i/o was maxed on the little graphic, at at 100% it said.

The main ones were:

svchost.exe (netsvcs) C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Datastore\DataStore.edb

svchost.exe (LocalSystemNetworkRestricted) C:\$Mft (NTFS Master File Table) PID 1000

There were lots of the second one with PID 1000, but the C:\$Mft one used the most disk i/o

Also at the very start after logging in were two explorer.exe 's. One was in the Windows folder, the other in C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Temp

Is that normal? Should there be an explorer.exe there ever? It was using a lot of disk i/o, but it went away after a while, and I could never find it in that folder.

Any input appreciated.

 

Try creating new user account and using that for testing, your current user account may be compromised.

 

Well I was running the Ultra Virus Killer portable, and after running some of the repair options, it asked me to reboot. I did and it went into Startup Repair, and it failed to repair it. Considering the infection and the slowness, plus the fact I indirectly ruined it with UVK, I have decided to restore the factory image, and after that, I will dual-boot Linux Mint on it, and try to get her to use that, since it should run with no problems compared to Vista, and it wouldn't be able to get malware.

I was wondering though if malware could have infected the factory image?