Unable to delete file

[Toxsick Kitty]

Last night I had a slight mishap- clicked on a bad link, and accidentally downloaded some evil program, despite having firewall / AV in place- afraid I panicked and probably clicked on something I shouldn't have.
Running W98 SE, McAfee AV & Firewall.
The prog is just called "System.exe", and sits in C/windows/system/system.exe.
Have run a virus scan, which detected 2 Trojans, which were deleted, and I also manually deleted a downloaded prog in the windows/downloaded program files.
Have tried to delete the offending prog manually, but just get error msg, saying "program is in use by windows, unable to delete".
My firewall kept throwing up alerts that this prog was trying to connect to internet, at first I kept telling it to block it.
But this alert was popping up every 2 seconds or so, and interfering with my other programs, so I ended up letting the firewall let it through....
Everything on my PC is still working OK except for file browsing, which I have to do a lot of as I work with graphics, images etc. When I double click any file, it takes forever to open in IE, and when I want to shut it again, the PC seems to freeze. Also, shut-down/ rebooting seems to hang, and I am having to manually shut down progs to start the shut-down process.
Can I delete this prog despite the error msg, and will this stop all the hanging probs?
Big sigh....

[darkangel]

Originally Posted by Toxsick Kitty

Last night I had a slight mishap- clicked on a bad link, and accidentally downloaded some evil program, despite having firewall / AV in place- afraid I panicked and probably clicked on something I shouldn't have.
Running W98 SE, McAfee AV & Firewall.
The prog is just called "System.exe", and sits in C/windows/system/system.exe.
Have run a virus scan, which detected 2 Trojans, which were deleted, and I also manually deleted a downloaded prog in the windows/downloaded program files.
Have tried to delete the offending prog manually, but just get error msg, saying "program is in use by windows, unable to delete".
My firewall kept throwing up alerts that this prog was trying to connect to internet, at first I kept telling it to block it.
But this alert was popping up every 2 seconds or so, and interfering with my other programs, so I ended up letting the firewall let it through....
Everything on my PC is still working OK except for file browsing, which I have to do a lot of as I work with graphics, images etc. When I double click any file, it takes forever to open in IE, and when I want to shut it again, the PC seems to freeze. Also, shut-down/ rebooting seems to hang, and I am having to manually shut down progs to start the shut-down process.
Can I delete this prog despite the error msg, and will this stop all the hanging probs?
Big sigh....

try booting into safe mode and run the virus scan then, also try ctrl-alt-del and see if u can see the files runing u should be able do delete them then, also u might want to try one of the onlline av scanners

[Toxsick Kitty]

Thank you so much for your help.

Once you wrote it down, it was obvious really: I did the ctrl/alt/delt command, shut down the offending prog, then went and deleted it, which it was now able to do, seeing as Windows wasn't using it anymore! All problems are gone- no more hanging when opening & closing files, no more hanging upon shut down. Brilliant!

It's always good to have someone being sensible when you are all in a tizzy, so thanx for being there!

Big smoochies!