We have a relatively new Win 7 laptop. It crashed recently and it was so severe, we had to reformat the harddrive.
During all this time, we discovered it had 4 versions of Exploit on it which eluded our virus protection program. In fact the crash occurred AFTER we updated Adaware, before its weekly scan.
Here is the thread about what we discovered about this messy crash:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread157917.html
Near the end of the thread are links I strongly suggest all Microsoft users should read carefully:
When you update Java on your computer the old versions remain active as programs. These programs are attacked by the Exploit virus malware, and it blocks your ability to open any antivirus program you have, and blocks your connection to the internet. My son made a Windows rescue disc from the Windows website and found the 4 versions I posted on that thread. He removed them, but the damage was already done, as Exploit itself only enables malware to enter and hide in .exe files.
Yesterday I went to the Java website and downloaded Java 27.
By clicking on the site, after, it actually read our cookies and told us what to delete. This rather takes the uncertainty factor away from this task. I cleaned up this desktop yesterday, which so far has not been infected, that we know of.
We also removed all Adaware programs from our 3 computers, since I don't think this is a valuable tool anyway.
Java does not over-write its old versions, so they pile up on your computer offering a "window" for malware to attach to.
All in all I removed over a Gig of them yesterday. It took about 1/2 hour.
We didn't know this, our experienced techie son didn't know this and it was tricky even finding this out by searching Google.
So I am posting this here for our members to go to Microsoft's link on the topic and then visit Java, and do the clean up of your programs in the computer control panel. This may save you major grief, with a crash, that is not recoverable from.