Thanks for the suggestions.
Quote: "since its such an old comp your probably best going for a clean OS install."
I was hoping to avoid that option - but it may come to that. That was one reason we backed up all his documents.
Quote: "It depends on where its located, it should be in the windows folder if its in windows/system or windows/system32 folders it seems to be the consensus that its a virus."
That's the next thing I'm going to check. I wanted to check the list of programs that run at startup as I had a similar problem recently and managed to delete the offending program manually (and followed it with a registry clean and AV scan). I was hoping to do the same in this case but couldn't locate the relevant bit of Administrative Tools on his machine
. With luck I'll do better next time.
Sometimes it pays to come armed with a simple pen and paper list of things to check.
Quote: "Seems to be associated mostly with older scanners so if you have one attached it may be the cause of it running."
Yes, that seems to be the consensus from a Google search. That's another thing to go on the list.
The annoying thing is that till this is sorted out I can't communicate with him by email - and phone calls are useless because he's extremely deaf. Otherwise we would probably have had this sorted by now.
