hi all. I just had a question about a friend's computer. A little while ago she got a virus that seemed relatively harmless (the bestfriends.pif thing) and so she put off fixing it....

well last night things started going crazy, her keyboard would lock up and her mouse would move extremely slowly. When we unplugged the keyboard the mouse worked normally.

At the bios boot screen it says "keyboard error" regardless of whether we type anything or not. I tried booting into safe mode both by pressing f8 at the bios screen and by run -> msconfig inside of windows(using the onscreen keyboard), but the virus seems to have disabled msconfig and i guess the keyboard isnt even working at the bios screen. regedit is disabled as is the ctrl-alt-del taskmanager.

Any ideas? anyone know what this virus is called?

thanks,
kaiser

can you post a hijackthis log? see link in my sig.
That will tell us what processes are running, which hopefully will be a better way to identify the virus. Assuming ofcourse that it is a virus!

Download hijackthis to a permenant directory, run it & click scan. When it's complete click 'save log' (the scan button changes into it) then post the contents of the file it creates in here. Hopefully an expert will then be able to help.

thanks i'll give her the program and get her to send me a hjt log.

i dont know much about this program but i thought it was strictly for browser issues? is that not the case?

Well it is primarily intended for detecting browser hijacks, but the log it provides gives us a list of all the running processes and also all the autostart entries, so there's usually a good chance of spotting processes (including viruses) etc that shouldn't be there.