For specs, see my post Post your Specs! - General Discussion - The Fire Panel Forums here.
I had incidentally installed a virus (sue me) this past Saturday, and then I had to install several anti-virus/malware removal tools alongside Microsoft Security Essentials (this is what I had to do according to an article I found on the particular virus that my computer was hit with), and within several hours or so, the virus was eventually removed.
And then, many problems began to arise. First, despite cleaning the virus, some of the anti-virus programs that I had to install had inexplicably disappeared.
Secondly, some of the existing programs (including the standard programs that come with Windows 7 by default) won’t show me the program when typing the name of it into the search field - hell, some programs, if not just one, will only show up under “Files” rather than showing up under “Programs”. Here are some examples. I can type in “word” and “excel” into the search bar and their respective programs show up under “Programs” just fine, but if I type in “powerpoint,” it doesn’t show “Microsoft PowerPoint 2010” like it should. Another example: typing in “paint” doesn’t show the “Paint” application (and neither does Paint.NET since I have that program installed). For this particular situation, I’d have to type “mspaint” into the search bar in order to launch the Microsoft Paint program.
Worst of all, every time after being turned off for an extended period of time, OneDrive prompts me to sign in after logging in – it never did this prior to the incident. More on this below.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
- Tried doing the system file checker; the first two times I did this (because the first time I did this, it was cutting it to close to my bedtime), there were some corrupt system files that could not be fixed – to cut a long story short, I eventually replaced those files after nearly countless hours; even after recovering said system files, that didn’t seem to fix the issue (I did a check just before writing this).
- Uninstalling and reinstalling OneDrive – that didn’t seem to fix the sign-in prompt issue.
- Tried doing a System Restore; the first time I tried it, it failed, but it somehow fixed the OneDrive problem; tried a few more times, didn’t do anything; after a few attempts, the OneDrive issue came back; doing it in Safe Mode didn’t work; and it didn’t work when I did System Restore in repair mode (didn’t need to insert a disc into the optical disc drive, oddly enough).
I’ve spent countless hours throughout the weekend attempting to fix these problems myself to no avail.
Is there any other way I could resolve these issues? It’s important to know that this is the computer that I use to edit videos on, so a clean reinstall would not be an option. However, I’ve read somewhere that creating a new user account fixes the problem. While I haven’t tested this myself, I do not want to replace my current user account with a new one just to resolve this issue.