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.
It sounds like the virus corrupted your search indexes. Try rebuilding the index, although I am not sure if it will completely fix the problem:
1.) Go to Control Panel > Indexing Options
2.) Review the selected drives. Make sure your hard drive is listed. If it isn’t, click “Modify.”
3.) Click Advanced. In the Troubleshooting group, click “Rebuild.”
Try booting into safe mode and logging into the hidden administrator account. This is like opening up another user account, except the administrator account has always been there.
If you want to do this, type this into command prompt, logging off and back on afterwards:
net user administrator /active:yes
I know you don’t want to create a new user account, but we should see if what you mentioned even works.
I totally forgot to mention that I already did that. I think I may have forgotten mention another thing that I already did, but I can’t remember at the moment.
But I will attempt to do the hidden administrator account thing, though.
I stand corrected - I probably didn’t do that (the item in bold lettering) when I originally did that. Rebuilding now (at the time of posting this), to see if it fixed the issue.
Okay, it sounds like the virus could’ve corrupted your registry, which is beyond the scope of what we can help you with. However, I will keep an eye out for an appropriate solution.
I’m sure other users in this community are skilled with PC; maybe someone else will have something to contribute that I was not aware of.