My friend called me last night and asked if I knew any good viral removal tools because he got a virus on his computer and his McAfee was not catching it.  He described the virus as taking over the computer, changing his background, the computer windows clock was displaying “virus alert” among other strange behaviors.  We determined through research we were dealing with AntiVirusXP2008.

Here is what Norton says about AntiVirus2008

Type: Misleading Application
Name: AntiVirusXP2008
Risk Impact: Medium
Systems Affected: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Behavior

The program must be manually downloaded and installed.

Here is a screen shot of AntiVirusXP2008

This info below was on http://hubpages.com/hub/XP-Antivirus regarding more specific behaviors.

XP antivirus 2008 behaves differently on different computers depending on at what stage of installation it’s been caught, but generally the appearance of XP antivirus pop-ups can end in:

- desktop icons and folders messed up or disappeared;
- Start button and taskbar disappeared;
- user’s settings corrupted;
- desktop background wallpaper changed;
- annoying screensaver you’ve never seen;
- disabled Task Manager;
- Windows Clock appearance changed;
- Windows unable to boot;
- Internet Explorer not working.

Check out this fine group of ExpressionEngine geeks, and in the front row is our mentor and instructor, Mike Boyink of Train-ee.com.  This class was truly wonderful.  The amount of material that was covered was impressive.  Here was the agenda.  With that massive amount of material, I was worried that we weren’t going to get through it all. But we did without feeling rushed, and also had time for lots of side topics.  For his first time instructing a class, he sure was on his game.  That guy is like an ExpressionEngine Encyclopedia.  It is pretty impressive.  I’m sure it will take me weeks to review the material and go through everything that was presented, but I feel I have a very solid understanding of EE now.  I can’t really say what my favorite aspect of the training was because it is hasn’t all sunk it yet and there was alot. I can’t wait to get back home and implement what we learned into client websites.  I feel so much more confident about what I’m doing with ExpressionEngine.  I know it will take some time for Mike and Collective Idea to put together some other courses on ExpressionEngine, but I definitely will be attending other events put on by these guys.