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Virii

19:33 / 23.01.05

Lately, MS Word has been on startup and telling me that it's making changes to the template. This is probably some sort of virus, right? What should I do about it? Ad-aware & Spybot don't seem to recognize it.

19:34 / 23.01.05

Isn't it vira?

19:40 / 23.01.05

Don't make me kick your ass again, LykeX. This is a serious question about virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus.

19:48 / 23.01.05

Again? When have you ever kicked my ass?
And I'm right, aren't I? You misspelled it, didn't you?

19:52 / 23.01.05

No, my friend, you are wrong. The plural of virus is viruses. I was being "cutesie" whilst asking for help and advice from my fellow (wo)man, which you have utterly failed to provide. Thank you so much for your valued attention.

19:54 / 23.01.05

Maybe it's herpes.

19:59 / 23.01.05

What's the plural of herpes? Like, say you've got several. I suppose you could just call them by name, eg: Janice's herpes, Esmerelda's herpes, Amanda's herpes... but then should the h'es be capitalized?

Goddammit, this thread is about virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus, not herpes.

20:01 / 23.01.05

I thought herpes was a virus...

???

20:02 / 23.01.05

You may have heard about cyber-sex in your daily lives. Perhaps on the news or over the dinner table. In fact your friends might say it's "rad" to have intercourse with your laptop. But it's not.

20:05 / 23.01.05

Oh, for the love of mike. Just forget it, you poltroons.

20:06 / 23.01.05

SHIT, it really is viruses.
Oh, the pain, THE PAIN! I freely admit, that I have now had my ass kicked.

20:08 / 23.01.05

Again!

21:13 / 23.01.05

When was the first time? HUH?
When have you ever kicked my ass(before this time)?

21:27 / 23.01.05

Did you know that there are two types of the Herpes Symplex virus, the first mainly occurs around the mouth/face, the second is predominately genital, though they can be transmitted mouth-to-genital, and vica versa. Yum!!

Grendel's Mother

21:28 / 23.01.05

Perhaps "virum?"

22:09 / 23.01.05

Oy, vey. With friends like you, who needs spinal meningitis? This thread is a schweinerei.

23:09 / 23.01.05

OK, geekboy with a Betty Boo fetish is in the house and wants to cure your herps^H^H^H^H^H viruses. Symptoms, please. Version of Office, OS and PC stylee required for diagnosis or I get out the gloves. [snap!] [maniacal grin]

08:58 / 24.01.05

It's interesting, LykeX. I dealt youa beating so savage and humiliating that you must've blocked it from your memory. Don't worry, though, you are in fine company. I'm a very violent and hateful person.

cube! My dear, dear friend who is afraid something... I can't remember what. Was it something from a movie? Anyway, my computer is in theory a Gateway somethingorother, but it's a zombie computer. It is running Windows XP Professional Version 2002, Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage. There are no symptoms, except that Word starts on system start-up and asks if I want to save changes made to the template, and keep coming back unless I crash it from the task manager.

The Symantec site located Trojan.StartPage on my computer, though it hasn't actually behaved in the way Symantec describes, I don't use IE anymore anyway, and it doesn't seem to change Word templates. Isn't this the sort of thing you get through Outlook? The instructions for removing Torjan.StartPage are a little daunting and I haven't done it yet.

09:23 / 24.01.05

Qalyn

Your next post will be your 3,000th. Use it for good. Try and top the words schweinerei and poltroon in it.

09:27 / 24.01.05

And quite frankly I don't think you should waste it in a thread about virii/uses/um/a. Maybe it needs a thread all of its own.

The Official Qalyn's 3000th Post Thread. You would have to start it, obviously, since if I did it would clearly be the unofficial one.

10:23 / 24.01.05

Hmm. I'm not a big XPert, but I think one thing you could try before all the houpla symantec recommend (which you probably should do when you get time, but it sounds like a relatively benign virus is there is such a thing) is to try running MSCONFIG (Start>Run>type MSconfig) and look under startup programs. Be careful you don't take out anything too critical, but if winword.exe is in there, you can safely get rid of that. I think you should also fire up IE6 and download all the updates it recommends (as we've said before, just because you don't use IE doesn't mean it's not a security risk.
Will type more when I get time.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

16:15 / 24.01.05

My Windows Fu is rusty and broken. It sounds as if there's a macro thingy happening, but that's hardly a startpage-related thingy. Probably wise to go nuclear with the antivirus and purge the thing. (And I think you can tamper with startup through the folder system as well, if MSConfig makes you nervous).

A related question, because I have been trying to help my Dad (who is not what you would call Computer Savvy) with his laptop: despite Microsoft's recent paranoid security purge, and despite my conducting my own personal Firewall & Antivirus Ezhovschina, and my manual disabling of Messenger, my poor Dad is still getting bloody popup messages from Carla the available teen when he's trying to read up on Guatemalan political unrest or whatever the topic of the day is. Anyone know how to block the evil crap properly?

16:59 / 24.01.05

Y'know, I did something to my parents' computer recently that has my mother all off-kilter. I was trying to load up a Microsoft add-on that "turns Chinese on" -- makes the Chinese characters viewable by MS Word, right?

It didn't work. Wrong version of Word for the package or something. Now, half the time when Word starts up, it tells you it can't open or something. I haven't been back to their house to fix it so I don't know what exactly the message says.

So, it *could* be an MS upgrade that's incompatible with your version of Word.

Or it could be that somehow an error slipped into Normal.dot. If that's the case, it should be easy to save another file (probably blank, but could be whatever -- I used to put "30" on the bottom of all my docs at work) as the normal.dot file -- .dot = document template. So, save that, then find the old normal.dot (probably in a folder inside the "Microsoft Office" folder, although if you're in XP it could be *anywhere*) and replace it with the new one. Oughtta be fine.