Icons on Desktop layered with another strange icon

[tjohn2]

Hi all,

Today I restarted my computer and all of the icons from my destop changed! They look very unfamiliar, with a red/blue/purple bull-type icon sitting on top of my regular icon. See link: http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh99/jabberinjohnsons/Craigs%20List/StrangeIcons.jpg

Has anyone seen this before? Also, I had at one time opened my "documents" and some of the folders had smiley faces on top of them, looking just like the Yahoo smiley face, but that has since disappeared. What's going on??

Thanks, Traci

[Tekkno]

Sounds like it probably is a virus of some sort. I noticed you are running McAfee, is the subscription still active and are the definitions up to date? If not, take care of that or go to trend micro's housecall and run a scan. Could you post pics of your add/remove programs?

[tjohn2]

Thank you Tekkno! I am current on my McAfee subscription, and up to date on definitions. I ran a complete McAfee scan after I saw the crazy stuff on my computer, but nothing turned up. I've since restarted my computer and it's all back to normal again. I'll try the Trend Micro scan. Thanks for the suggestion.

[IMG]http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh99/jabberinjohnsons/Craigs%20List/AddRemovePrograms.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh99/jabberinjohnsons/Craigs%20List/AddRemovePrograms2.jpg[/IMG]

Traci

[Tekkno]

Nothing jumps out there as being suspicious. When did this start happening? Do you remember installing anything new just before or notice anything else strange? When you click these icons does the correct program come up or do you get an error?

[tjohn2]

It happened 2 days ago after a restart. Then after restarting again, it has disappeared. The only other thing that has changed is my mouse buttons got switched around (the side buttons for back/forward).

Traci

[Tekkno]

So your icons are back to normal? If they are, and you have ran both the virus scans, I wouldn't worry about it unless it happens again. Is your mouse still acting up?

[tjohn2]

Yeah, I really haven't worried too much about, although yes, my mouse is still messed up. I just found some software that I downloaded from Microsoft which will hopefully fix it. Thanks for your help and recommendations!

Traci

[Tekkno]

Well that is good. About your mouse, what you'll want to do is go to your control panel then mouse. There should be a setting under the buttons tab to "invert" and make sure this is not checked. It may also say switch buttons or something depending on your mouse.

[Adamsappleone]

Thought I would add a little to this;

You might want to run Windows Defender. You can also run the MS Malicious Software Removal Tool. Click Start/Run and type in "MRT" then enter and follow the prompts. If you don't have it, you can download it here;
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD724AE0-E72D-4F54-9AB3-75B8EB148356&displaylang=en
Also you can download and run this;
http://www.malwarebytes.org/
It's free. Be sure to update it first before running the scan.
Another thing to remember is that you should only run 1 scanner at any given time.