This article will deal with quite a nasty little virus and who ever programmed it is a complete sadist and therefore demands our deepest respect. However, I will show you how to get rid of it forever and to restore complete system functionality.

What makes this virus so terrible is that it attacks you from three fronts, has many parts and does everything in its power to hide itself. You need to take it out in one foul swoop.

There are also many variants of this virus but they all do the same thing.

I call this specific one amvo but there is also an avpo variant. They all utilise the 'autorun.inf' file. But let me show you what to do if your computer is infected with a virus or spyware.

But first you must diagnose the infection. The symptoms are:

You cannot open any of your drives from 'My Computer'. For example, double clicking on C:\ will display a message that informs you that the computer cannot find the program to open file.
You are not able to set the 'show hidden files' to show. It resets every time you open the 'folder options' menu.
Your computer tries to dial up to the internet on its own.
You get an invalid registry-reference dialogue box when Windows loads.

If three of these four conditions are met, then you are infected.

The best way to see if you are infected by this virus is to actually go into your 'C:\Windows\System32\' directory from the DOS prompt and to type: 'dir avpo*.exe /a' or 'dir amvo*.exe /a'. The '/a' modifier shows files with all attribute tags and the asterisk tells the computer to look for amvo with anything added to the end. For example, 'amvo1.exe'.

Now for the virus hunt:

Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del'.
Go to the Processes' tab.
Look for any of these entries and end process' them:
a. amvo.exe
b. rthrw.com
Now end the process called 'explorer.exe'.
Go to the drop down menu called 'file' and click on 'new task (run)'.
Type: 'cmd.exe'

Ms-DOS will pop up and you will be in your 'settings and documents' directory.

Type: 'cd\'

This will take you to 'C:\'. The next step will be to change the attributes of some files so that they can be deleted. (You need to do this on all your drives including your flash drives and external hard disks.

Type: 'attrib autorun.inf -r -s -h'
Type: 'del autorun.inf'
Type: 'attrib rthrw.com -r -s -h'
Type: 'del rthrw.com'

Do this for all drives. After you did this on all your drives type:

'cd windows\system32'
Type: 'attrib amvo.exe

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