Some of these trojans delete or make it difficult for you to run these anti-malware programs. After my experiences, I’d say the best and easiest solution is to not worry about cleaning off the virus but simply use System Restore from Safe Mode to get back to the configuration you had prior to your attack. Windows stores a new configuration for you every day. So that would be starting at step 5 (above) and would have taken a couple of hours. That’s what I’ll try first the next time (hopefully many years from now) it happens.

One thing to note about system restore. After you start it, it takes a couple of minutes for anything at all to happen. You’ll think you didn’t click it and you’ll try clicking it again. But if you do, it’ll pop up a box that says it is running and that will cancel the process and you won’t know what state you’re in. This is horrible implementation. A box should pop up right away saying its checking configurations, but it doesn’t. So be aware and give it up to 5 minutes to respond the first time. After that, it works great. We’re lucky Microsoft put the work in to make it available. Otherwise, it’s two weeks to load everything again from scratch.