helpintoledo

Sorry for my delay, I intended to notify you sooner, but I will be away from the troubled computer until Tuesday. I hope to complete the next step and reply late Tuesday night.

Did a little research on the dns resolver cache failing to flush and found out my DNS Client service not running was the culprit there. Tried to start it manually and I get "Could not start the dns client service on local computer. Error 5 Access is denied" I haven't found a good solution for this issue yet.

Firefox is not installed. And without a browser I'm not sure how I'll be able to download anything outside of loading things to CD from a different PC as I mentioned previously, since USB also fails. Unless I can still FTP and any of these tools are available via FTP. I will test the protocol and see if it works anyway.

I reset Chrome before my last post and that made no difference in connection. I reset IE via Internet Options in control panel since IE does not start, that didn't help to get IE to launch. After that however I thought to try to open IE directly from the executable instead of the desktop link and it does open, and it connects to MSN but will only load content from the msn.com domain. Attempts to navigate outside of msn.com get a no connection error. Since I hadn't considered launching it prior to resetting defaults I'm not sure if it actually had any effect at all.

Actually, let me correct myself. I do have internet connectivity, I am able to ping yahoo and google, but the browser is somehow now blocked. I am getting a message to the effect of "website may be down or may have permanently moved" for everything now, similar message in Chrome as in the Avast SafeZone browser, and I've reset Chrome to default settings. (Haven't been able to get IE to even start the whole time I've worked on this PC.) I tried an "ipconfig /flushdns" and that failed. Said it "Could not flush the DNS Resolver Cache: Function failed during execution".

The permissions reset job finished and the PC restarted, but I've lost networking entirely now. Prior to this I was not able to access the network protocol management dialogs, but it still connected via broadband over ethernet. Now, no internet. And I still can't see or adjust the TCP/IP settings or any of the networking stack via the Control Panel.

OK, running now. What is the next step?

There are definite differences between the two sets of logs.

FRST.txt Addition.txt

One more note, I think I mentioned directory permissions have been problematic. Everything is marked read only, and I mean everything, and the only way I can write to any folders is to set them to shared on the network, and that doesn't work everywhere. Anyhow, when I ran FRST, it displayed an error that it coulde not save C:\FRST\HIVES and another that it could not update. The C:\FRST dir was also read only AND I could not set it to shared on the network, so I tried deleting it and everything under it via the Recovery Console. That worked to avoid the "Could not save C:\FRST\HIVES" issue on the next run, but it still ahd a Failed to update (3) error. Here are the rerun logs. I will post them and diff them from the last set from another computer.

FRST.txt Addition.txt

mbamLog20170815.txt

Also, I was just able to get a V2 MBAM installer to execute. The installer ran fine, and the virus definitions update loaded with no issue, but I was not able to update to MBAM V3. More folder permissions/ access denied errors issued. Here is the output log, I have not taken any action yet, I've left MBAM as is waiting for your review: Grr. attachment is not working I will post here and attempt to attach log to next response. Unfortunately, clipboard is not working either. Anywhere.

I have been running into more issues including browser connectivity, but I was able to run ComboFix again, this time from the original Administrator user, and I found an Avast SafeZone browser my dad had installed that I can post this from. But I am unable to use the "Run As" functionality. Not sure if that matters at all when logged into the Administrator user. log.txt

OK, I have the PC online. Both users are administrator users but now I can only access the original Admin at startup via Safe Mode (that may be normal windows behavior to not show the default Administrator user once a second is created in regular boot mode? not really sure). But I did rerun MBAR with a current virus definition update and it still found nothing. Tried to run ComboFix again, I had to run it from a thumb drive directly last time as it would not copy to the hard drive (more system issues there obviously) and now I cannot get the USB drivers to install correctly to even run it from the thumb drive. Which brings up an issue I didn't think to mention. The USB drivers needed to reinstall every time a thumb drive was plugged in, and now that fails. Does this behavior sound like any particular virus/rootkit? I will try to burn ComboFix to CD and run from there tonight, hopefully that works, any other utilities you would suggest I put on the CD before I write to it?