by Jim
Aug 18, 2009 2:14 PM
I got some nasty malware yesterday. It restarted my machine, and my user account started rebooting shortly after logging in. Read on for the fix…
I was able to log in as administrator, or in safe mode. Sometimes, right before the restart, I would see a message from Windows Sidebar indicating a problem – something along the lines of, “Windows Sidebar experienced a problem with the following gadgets…”
I guessed that the problem was an IE add-on that restarted the computer as soon as the Internet Explorer process loaded.
The first step was to prevent the sidebar from running the Internet Explorer process. I did this by removing all the gadgets from the sidebar. From the administrator account, I deleted all files in
Jim\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets folder
where ‘Jim’ is my non-admin user account that was experiencing the reboots.
This allowed me to log into the Jim account and not get an immediate reboot. I clicked on the IE icon, and sure enough, it logged me off and restarted the machine.
To prevent IE from running add-ons, I opened regedit and changed the setting from there, as described here:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Enable Browser Extensions
I changed this value to “no”, and IE started without rebooting the computer.