.pav

[IcSilk]

I was looking for other threads related to this and was very surprised not to find any.

A certain Pc I use is also used by other less security conscious people and somehow a program got on it that is named "personal antivirus" it installs in the program files folder as 'PersonalAV' and seems to have a .pav extension.

I do not want this on the computer and it does not show up in the add/remove programs list ... How the hell do I get rid of it??

I have scanned it with my other AV/firewall and it doesn't seem to be malicious, its just bothersome that its there and so persistent in remaining - and always throwing redundant pop up windows at me.

[nihil]

Hi, that would be back in the old days of H+BEDV.................. now called AntiVir.

You might like to look at this:

http://www.sophos.com/security/analy...fakeavpav.html

[Cider]

Removing registry entries and folders should kill this.

As Nihil said we got a flood of this in the past year. Basically it requesires user intervention to execute on the machine whether it be through a active X control and normall y a pop-up ...

Let us know if you have more trouble cleaning it up.

You can also try an online scan to make sure you are clean.

www.activescan.com

[IcSilk]

Thanx guys for the effort ... I ended up just manually uninstalling it -

Here ---> http://www.darfuns.com/spyware-remov...-fake-spyware/

I went through the registry key by key and of all the items this site said to look for there was only one I found, deleted it and all is well .. no problems.

[nihil]

You might try this:

http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_...ry_cleaner.htm

It will clean any orphan rubbish from the Registry, and it automatically makes a backup.

Talking of backups, don't forget to clear out your restore points and manually create a new one

AV products are generally not very good at detecting this sort of annoyance, as it technically isn't malware, and as Cider has mentioned, it usually requires some sort of user participation to load.

I personally use (amongst others):

1. Spybot S & D
2. A-Squared
3. Malwarebytes (includes RogueRemover)
4. Ad-Aware

Spybot and Ad-Aware have resident protection capabilities as well.