While I was using Mozilla Firefox today I got a popup telling me to download Win Anti-virus, so I closed firefox via task manager and ran Adaware. About 30 seconds into the scan I had accumulated 9 critical objects when an error message popped up telling me Windows NT had to shutdown now, and it gave me a 60 second countdown. Attempting to remove whatever I had caught during the scan before the shutdown, I stopped the adaware scan and selected all objects and clicked the proceed button to get rid of them, but as soon as I did that my computer started to shut down.

So the when the computer had rebooted I tried scheduling a boot-time scan with Avast!. Everything seemed to work fine but when the system rebooted the Avast! scan didn't run. I tried again and the same thing happened.

Seeing System Restore as my only option I went into the registry editor to see if something had disabled it. There was a DisableSR registry there so I deleted it and tried to run system restore: didn't work. So I rebooted in Safe Mode with command prompt and tried to run it from there and it gives me the message "System Restore cannot protect your computer."

Does anyone know what this is and how I can get rid of it? I'd like to avoid wiping my hard drive if possible.

It's possibly a vundo infection...
==download hijackthis: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5554.html
-install it to a new folder alongside your program files and then rename the Hijackthis.exe to imabunny.exe.
-in that folder start HijackThis by dclicking the .exe; now close ALL other applications and any open windows including the explorer window containing HijackThis.
-click the Scan and Save a Logfile button. Post the log in a NEW thread over in the Viruses and Nasties forum, please.