w32/bube.gen & Continual Reboot

[n1kk1]

first off love the thread title at least it made me laugh during this horrible situation. :) thanks.

here's the issues at hand, i'm hoping someone can offer some suggestions for next steps to try. :)

ok...i'm fixing this machine for my sister. tons of music/data i'm trying not to lose for her.

machine stats:
winXP 2002 sp2/winME compaq
1.1 ghz AMD athlon
640 mb RAM (seems too low, virus affecting that count?)
2 drives

machine problem:
initially the machine could hardly keep a connection to the net, lots of bogus crap popping up in IE, etc...wierd toolbar appearing on desktop, smelled of virus, adware etc..

installed mcaffee (yea too late) :)
it remedied many viruses, i cleaned out many with regedit...but one remained w32bube.gen which couldn't be deleted/cleaned, was attached to explorer.exe

computer was ok as an offline computer for a few months to do photoshop/printing etc....

currently i cannot boot w/o going into safe mode, if i allow it to boot normally once it gets to the user selection screen (home edition) the machine just reboots inself. this happens when trying both the xp or me installation.

i've cleaned it with ultimatebootcd.com, the latest edition of macaffee which seems to be the latest dat that claims to fix w32bube.gen, kaspersky, ran disk checks and they ran clean...so i just can't figure out why i can't boot successfully.

even though i've seen posts on the net that some folks have been able to remove, i'm unsure how i can if i can't boot properly. thinking of just buying a fat external drive to back up the data and then just blow away the machine and rebuild from scratch...so this is my last ditch effort of doing that.... any suggestions? :)

much thanks in advance.

peace,
nikki

[dlh6213]

Hi Nikki, welcome to DaniWeb :)

Backing up and reinstalling is always the best way to cure problems, but if you would like to try to resolve it before resorting to that, try posting a HijackThis log, it may help us spot whatever is causing your problem. There's a link to it in the 'Infection Removal" link below.