Let no good deed go unpunished!

[Flint]

Originally Posted by case

That really sucks, flint.

I ended up with that XP Anti-Virus thing on my laptop a while back...

It's a real motherfucker, this thing. I think this will zap it, but I haven't tried it yet.

For anyone's future reference, I think this is how he got it:

You're surfing along, and something pops up telling you that you have X number of virus, and no virus protection, and download this thing to fix it. It may even burrow in and then later pop up from the system tray; because that's where the thing lives now, masquerading as the Windows security alert icon. So anyway, you download the thing, and it's a trojan which takes over your system and starts inviting all it's friends in.

Two things that piss me off about this: I put virus protection and a firewall on this PC, so when it said "you don't have any protection" and he believed it, did he think that I was lying to him?! He trusted an anonymous fucking popup over me?! Obviously he did, and the real reason why he didn't find this behavior unusual is that he has AOL. And AOL also takes over your system and does all kinds of shit without asking you. So, in his mind, that's what computer programs are: a "smart" thing that makes decision for you without your knowledge or consent. AOL fucks people up.
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Oh, and thanks for all the suggestions. I may use the software that lookout suggested. The other suggestions I fear would be wasted on this guy.

My current plan is to keep it for about a week, and make him think it's permanently destroyed and will never work again, and he doesn't have a computer at all anymore. I'll make sure to let him know exactly what he did wrong, so he can thnk about that. Eventually, I will at "great effort" manage to find a way to fix it. And when I finally give it back to them, his wife should be so pissed that she will be on the "lookout" for those emails.
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Oh, and one more thing: No amount of security in the world can protect you if you knowingly invite something in. Your security is ultimately up to you.