I hate computers

Sometimes, I really hate having to deal with computers.

....and since (in theory) I'm the expert, whenever anyone I know has a computer problem, they come to me and ask for advice and/or help. I don't mind helping - at all! -- but sometimes it's really hard (or impossible) to fix 'em.

Especially when you get virused.

Our upstairs machine caught a spyware (or 9), and was running badly. It would flip up a "balloon warning" from our taskbar constantly; and would pop up a window about every minute or so that would bring all other tasks on the machine to a halt. This spyware was devious -- it was extraordinarily hard to find and eliminate it.

Well, after tons and tons and tonnagely tons of hours, I finally got it (I'm pretty sure) de-spywared.

But.

One of the things this (evil) spyware did was to constantly disable our virus checker. So when I finally got the (satanic) spyware off the machine, I updated and ran the virus checker....which found over 1,200 instances of the Sality virus.

And it healed one of them...the other remained.

Damn it.

So I re-ran the virus checker in "safe" mode. It found the same number of instances (minus the one it had so efficiently healed already), and healed none of 'em. Damn it.

And.

When I re-booted the machine, all our permissions had been disabled. I can't do anything on the machine any more. I can't run word, or excel, or or or anything.....and I can't even launch the "users" routine from the control panel to try to restore permissions. It tells me I don't have permission to do it.

Damn it.

I really don't know what to do. I'm going to try to do a Repair from my XP disk, but if that doesn't work, I don't know what to do.

Damn it.