Virus Prevents all .exe Execution

Eradicating another nasty virus

Another computer infested with some nasties found its way to my desk. Cleaning the Trojans from this one was easy, getting windows working again after proved to be slightly more difficult...

As before, for the benefit of others that might be facing a similar issue here are the steps taken to solve the issue. The system was a Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit based laptop. The virus itself was a common variety of fake virus checker and it was easily removed by rebooting in safe mode, clearing all the temp folders and running  malwarebytes and super antispyware scans. The problem was that after cleaning the system nothing would execute. All ability to run any .exe file would fail.

The solution was to edit the registry and restore the .exe file associations manually.

Under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT then exe ensure the Value Data to is exefile in this case it had been set to something else.

Then also under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT in the folder of exefile and Change the Value Data to "%1" %* finally under that exefile folder, then shell, then open, finally command folder, Change the Value Data to "%1" %*

After a few restarts everything was back to normal with the ability to run in all the missing windows updates and finally install the anti-virus software (another .exe that needed to run)

---