For all-day every day security, you want a full-scale antivirus to keep malware attacks away from your system. Sometimes, though, you can't even install that full-scale protection because the malware fights back. In cases like that, a free, cleanup-only tool like Norman Malware Cleaner 2.08 can be a life saver. It doesn't need installation; you just download it and run a scan. Delete it when you're done, because there's a new version every day.
Norman Malware Cleaner opens to a page that offers a quick, full, or custom scan. You won't go wrong by simply selecting a full scan and clicking start. However, you may want to make one small change to the configuration settings. All of the scanning options are turned on by default, including scanning for rootkits. However, for some reason the option to clean rootkits is disabled by default. I enabled it for all of my tests.
I should point out that this truly is a newer product than Norman Malware Cleaner 2.1, which I reviewed previously. That was actually version 2.01; a quirk in presentation eliminated the zero.
A Few Obstacles
Norman Malware Cleaner ran without incident on ten of my twelve malware-infested test systems. On six of those systems it asked permission to reboot the system and rescan to complete the cleanup process; I always said yes to that offer.
On one test system, it asked to reboot and rescan over and over. After repeating this six times, I took a look at the log files. To my surprise, Windows asked what program it should use to open them. A little investigation showed that notepad.exe, along with literally hundreds of other files, had been quarantined. At the tech support agent's request, I supplied a dozen or so of those quarantined files.
Tech support analyzed the problem and updated the next day's edition of Norman Malware Cleaner to handle it. I simply restored all of the files from quarantine and ran a new scan. Note that the same problem happened during my testing of Norman Antivirus 10??? , but without the same easy resolution. The antivirus uses a version of Norman Malware Cleaner to perform a pre-install scan, but this scan doesn't leave a log or identify quarantined files. Norman's designers plan to change that.
The cleanup process on another test system eliminated some essential Windows files, rendering the system completely unbootable. At the advice of tech support I created a bootable Ubuntu USB drive?it was surprisingly easy. I booted from the drive, sent the log to tech support, and got back instructions that let me restore the system to health.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/2FFvkw6nkhk/0,2817,2420403,00.asp
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