THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES...

> Malware Infections

> Sleep Problems

> Windows 7 issues

Malware Begone!

I hope the Doctor is in, as I have a very frustrating problem with some adware/ malware. My pastor has an older PC running Win 10. It has the free versions of AVG and Malwarebytes installed, along with Windows Defender. A year or so ago, she started getting ads for Staples.com popping up, taking over the Chrome browser. We noticed that while she was working on a document, the Run command prompt would pop up in the lower-left of the screen and she would be taken to Staples.com. I checked the Run command history and found several variations of Staples.com in the list. Some were misspelled. I ran deep scans with AVG and Malwarebytes but found nothing. I erased the Run history, cleared the cache, ran CCleaner, and hoped for the best. Three days later, it happened again, and she was unable to use the computer, as it just kept running the Run command by itself. I scanned her USB drives and a desktop drive that is connected, with nothing found.

Finally, after trying a search for anything with “staple” on the entire computer and finding nothing of note, I did a complete reinstall of Windows 10 without saving any old files. After reinstalling all her software, the machine worked great again. Until recently. The Staples Run command has reappeared. Clearly, something is infected, but scans don’t find anything. Can you offer any suggestions as to how to locate the culprit file on USB connected drives?