Yesterday I clicked some link off Fark and along with it came a dozen popups. That is always a bad sign but I was tired so I shut everything down and went to bed. This morning I fired up the computer and right away I knew something was wrong.

Symptoms:

Can't open many webpages, IE would freeze.
Many of the pages I could open would freeze for a few seconds before completing the load.
Homepage changed.
Can't open WMP.
Several questionable apps listed in Add/Remove programs(ielogger).

So I updated AdAware and scanned my system. Tons of spyware hooks found and removed. Updated McAfee and scanned my system; virus Pate.b infected every file on my desktop but it has been cleaned off. Rescanned my system to be sure and it says I'm virus free. Questionable programs were uninstalled.

A majority of the symptoms are gone except for one, I still can't open Windows Media Player. When double clicking on any video file or the WMP executable itself the system dings at me and nothing happens. No error, nothing. I removed WMP and reinstalled it but that didn't help and I ran out of time this morning to work on it.

Anybody seen this problem or have any further advice? I'm pretty close to wiping my system clean and reinstalling XP and the major apps I use however I wouldn't mind avoiding it if possible.

Thanks

Do you know when you muzzed things up? See if you have a system restore point to before you did that.

System restore is a pretty good tool for going back in time. I prefer a Delorean, but whatever works

Or start using Firebird.

That won't help you fix the problems you already have, but it won't allow you to get anymore of that BS garbage spyware shiat stuff while surfing.

It could just be that in the removal of the spyware and/or virus, some of your codecs became corrupt. Try re-installing your codecs.