Did a repair on a VERY infected computer and now i can't activate..

[Tabby8]

I have found many helpful solutions on this site, but this is my first post. so forgive me if im posting in the wrong section.

I'm a tech by profession and work mostly on virus/spywar. Normally that's no problem i can use various tools and edit them out of the registry no problem. however, yesterday i had an HP Pavilion a518x come in that was beyond my control. to the point even in safe mode with 512mb of ram it took ten minutes to get into the log in screen. that's fine i waited it out and plugged in my thumbdrive with a-squared2, avg antispy, and Analyze This on it. they all installed but i decided to run the Analyze This before the scans. i checked off 68 very obvious things that shouldn't be present and clicked fix. no luck, after 5 seconds i got an error from Analyze this not even "windows" and the program shut down. so i restarted and ran the other programs i had installed, got rid of a few thousand problems that way, but not enough. off the top of my head i know there was WINDOWS ANTIVIRUS 2006, WINDOWS ANTIVIRUS 2007, WINDOWS ANTISPYWARE 2007, ERROR CHECK, ROGUE SUSPECT(three diffrent downloads of smitfraud, that i have used on other machines would not run), STARWARE, and the fake windows security alert/notifier. many, many more to.

still after running those programs with system restore off i could not get into a regular log in and safe mode still took an eternity and wouldn't even let me into the administrator profile. there was no password it just shut down. so, as i normally do i ran a dell system C.D (the user didnt have his discs) on it and did a repair. i was prepaired to have to reactivate windows etc afterwords. now, it gets me to the regular log in page and when i click to log in sure enough i need to activate before i log in. ok, great except when you click yes to register the computer restarts itself. i have tried this numerous times with the same result. and you cannot register in safe mode.

so my question is "now what?" the customer has numerous costly programs.. word, quicken, picasa, photoshop and more and no disks. so a reformat is a definite last resort, even if i saved all of his data and found all of his outlook, quicken etc he would have to go out and buy all new disks or risk getting himself infected agian by trying to pirate them. which he proved he is not capable of. any help would be GREATLY appreciated. :S

this is a repost as i posted in the wrong forum

[gerbil]

Well, the sys is obviously still pretty filthy, a repair would have fixed damaged sys files but not affect any malware that had their own files.... you've got 30 days to activate, why not run Panda now that you are online with it?
Use CCleaner first. http://www.ccleaner.com/
==Please use IE to do an online scan at panda:- http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/activescan?
-select a link to the scan... free online virus scan...., enter a valid? email and follow through, choosing My Computer for a full system scan.
Post the log it produces here.
Numerous costly pgms but no disks? I won't ask.....

[Tabby8]

Thank you for your response.

i should have been more clear, i am online on a diffrent machine. i was never able to get past the xp log in screen. due to the fact that it was XP Pro and i used a dell disk on an HP machine. which as i stated earlier isn't normally a problem. but since it was still so infected it would stop at the log in screen and tell me to activate, as soon as i would click ok activate the machine would restart.

i have a 24-48 hour turn around time on my machines, so yesterday i called and told him that it sucked to be them, i could save their files but no programs and that was just the way it was.

it always dumbfounds me that some people will spend hundreds of dollars on a program and not burn a copy of it, or at least take care of it. but common sense isn't all too common is it?

even tho i've finished the machine already i'd like to leave this topic open incase someone knows a fix for the future. thanks agian for your response and for the replies to come..

[gerbil]

Yep, it's clear now, thanks. The repair is on top of an installation that would have long ago required activation, so..... grief it looks like.
You need a bootable thumbdrive with AV etc