A malaware attack..

Recently my laptop(Vista SP2) came under a malaware attack. I got redirected from one site to page which was resembling a progressing virus scan in the Windows Explorer. I closed this page, but it somehow managed to download few things on my machine. One of them was a kind of  security tool, indicating something wrong on my machine in the task bar. It was running an executable named like some big number. It was running off c:\program data folder. I killed the executable and got rid of that folder . After this was done, Norton virus scan dialog box came up. It was essentially asking me to buy Norton. I don't have, never had Norton on my machine. It looks, what ever got installed on my machine installed Norton as well ( I was surprised with this). I uninstalled Norton. I thought everything is gone and I am good.

Next day when I started browsing, I noticed clicking any link on any website was taking me to some advertising sites. I was shocked with this.At this point I went to famous No Script for Firefox. It showed me there is a host which is doing all this. That host was google-analystiks.us. I didn't notice this at the first glance as it is very similar to the Google Analytics. I think this was introduced by the malaware.

I have McAffee installed on my machine. I ran a scan and it didn't help. After that I came across a tool called MalawareBytes. A quick scan of this tool found the malaware and quarantined it. This tool looked very efficient. It completed a quick scan of the PC in about 8-10 minutes and found the malaware.

Information about this tool can be found here http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html

Since then the sytem is looking good, I haven't experienced automatic redirects to advertising sites. Hope fully its recovered husssssh.

I always use NoScript with Firefox, I uninstalled it for few days because of some issue and ran into this. I got NoScript back again and hopefully don't have to uninstall it again.

Thanks
Prasad Pimparkar

Project Creation Failed in VS2008

Recently I ran in to an error while creating a project in Visual Studio 2008 which said "Project creation <project name> failed".

I spent couple of hours figuring out what's wrong. Here are the options which I came across. I will start with the one that worked for me.

1) Run following command to start visual studio

devenv /resetskippkgs

What I noticed in my case was, few days back I got an error in VS2008, which said its skipping some packages because of some issues.

2) This is another option which I came across. Follow following steps.

Another option which I came across is as follows.

1. Run following command.regsvr32 C:\[Visual Studio installation dir]\Common7\IDE\VsWizard.dll
2. After running this command, open registry editor and assign appropriate permissions to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\VSWizard.VsWizardEngine.9.0 key. (though I did not find any issues with this key). Restart Visual Studio.
   

3) Following is last which I came across for this purpose. This looked to be related to the Beta release of Visual Studio.

1. Navigate to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE in Windows Explorer
   
2. Load devenv.exe.config in your favorite text editor.
   
3. Find this string: "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface"
   
4. Comment out the element

These are various options I could see for this issue. If anybody knows any other solutions for this, please comment.