Win32 Virus Removal

Question: My computer has a bad virus. I have XP. When I turn on my computer, the virus bankerfox.a and others pop up and won't let me get on the Internet.

— Lorna, Rochester

Answer: You can get rid of it by dancing The Security Tango (http://securitytango.com), but that's hard to do if you can't get to the Internet!

Luckily, there are two other ways you can get rid of it.

One of them involves mucking about in the registry. I absolutely do not recommend doing that.

The other method involves money. Take your system to a reputable dealer. What tech support can do is take the hard drive out, put it in another machine, and run the Security Tango on it from a different bootable hard drive.

By not booting your drive, the virus that's taken it over cannot run, and therefore cannot defend itself against removal.

Question: Quite some time ago (maybe 10 years) I started to get e-mails from real estate people about houses for sale. I sort of wrote these off as being spam — but they seemed a tad higher class than the normal spam.

Then I started getting e-mails from mortgage brokers on how they could reduce my interest rates. I tried contacting some of these people to see where they were getting my e-mail address, but have never gotten a reply.

I started getting other e-mails, like a reminder to vote for the mayor in an election in a city where I don't even live. Even a nice note from the CongressCritter from that area. Again, e-mails to these people have never produced a reply.

For a long time I was getting weekly coupons for $5 off at my friendly neighborhood Applebee's (unfortunately a very long drive from here). Same for TGIF, where they were entering me in a weekly drawing for a free meal.

The latest: Somehow Comcast has associated my e-mail address as belonging to one of their customers, with all kinds of offers to upgrade my service and so on. I'm not even with Comcast.

I have to assume someone has picked my e-mail address to use in filling out various forms where he needs to supply an address, but doesn't want to be bothered with e-mails from some businesses.

Any good suggestions on how I put a stop to this nonsense?

I don't know if my ISP is the correct place to complain to, or if it is a police matter. Not sure if any laws are being broken or if they would be federal or state, and besides New York has laws that don't agree with other states.

And, I don't know if the local police would be that interested in the situation. I suppose I could complain to the attorney general in the other state.

— Bob, Fairport

Answer: Most people don't use real e-mail addresses when they need to fake one; I agree that it's pretty low class to do so. Yes, you can certainly make contact with the attorney general in that other state.

I'm not a lawyer, but you might want to talk to one about having a case touching on identity theft. If you've kept all the e-mails you've been getting, and if those e-mails have enough information in them to identify the person who's using your address, something might happen.