I got hit by a rather nasty PC virus last Wednesday night called win32/virut. It managed to wreck the operating sytem (windows XP), thankfully I religiously back up the whole PC onto an external Hard drive every night so have only lost a days work. Its apparently a rather nasty one thats doing the rounds & many if not all Antivirus software is having a bit of a battle with it. I had Windows firewall on & AVG & that couldnt stop it & the AVG fix I downloaded didnt work either neither did Malwarebytes. Not sure how it got in but obviously off of a site somewhere. I wasnt on the net at the time & hadnt been for some time, it all kicked off when I opened Microsoft office which I hadnt used for about a week so I guess that was a trigger. In hindsight amazing to watch as it slowly destroyed the operating system. Initially it turned the desktop white & threw up aload of shortcuts to "dodgy" sights, some I had genuinly never heard of, could have been embarasing if at work. If you get it imediately take the machine off any networks as Ive been told it can spread that way.

Its cost me a day with a techie & 2 new hard drives but thankfully all my work was saved, it dosent bear thinking about what might have happened had I not had a decent back up.

Hopefully none of you will get this one but back up onto an external drive on a regular basis. It saved me

This is from Microsoft & see the notes at the end, even if fixed some files will be damaged beyond repair.

Encyclopedia entry: Win32/Virut - Learn more about malware - Microsoft Malware Protection Center

Work got hit with this a couple of months ago. It's is a particularly clever nasty. even the name is a pain because there was a virut bug several years ago. Threw us a bit.

Infected by?

All the Machines in my house are Linux and BSD based so no need to bother :P

This the one -

W32.Virut.W Technical Details | Symantec

No, I would imagine it's W32.Virut.CF, not W32.Virut.W.

Stuart - I assume you were running Internet Explorer as an administrator?