Hi Tom... I'm back after a blessedly long time without a problem... but I guess any smooth patch must at some point come to an end. You helped me a bunch before and I remembered you so here I am!

I thought I'd offer a brief description of what's happening so that you can, if relevant, point me toward a posting that already deals with my issue. I tried to search on the forum by keyword but couldn't find a posting to address it, but who knows, maybe I missed it.

So: I'm on a PC with XP. IE 8 (maybe part of the problem). McAfee Internet Security, active subcription. Other day I'm on IE and suddenly a fake "XP AntiVirus" pops up. Pretty hilarious how it looked. I knew I was infected right away.

I used instructions over at bleepingcomputer to address it:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-r ... urity-2011

Downloaded everything on a different computer, brought it to the infected one via flash drive. The steps seemed to work, the Anti-Virus pop-ups went away... until...

I rebooted my computer and now there's a red shield in my icons on the bottom right of my screen, acting like it's a "Window Security Alert". It starts as a balloon when I boot and then the balloon goes away and the shield stays around. It tells me automatic updates is off and I need to turn it on. That's not true; I checked via control panel. My auto-updates are on. It's a fake, I'm pretty sure, and I'm pretty sure I'm still infected with something. Please let me know how I should proceed.
Thanks!