DooMikE

So as I was browsing through the oh-so-lovely Skulltag Drama Thread on Blogs, I was notified of a trojan by Norton. It "deleted it", and shortly after a message box appeared that read something like this: "Windows has encountered a critical error and will restart in one minute. Save your work.". My computer did not restart, but virtually everything stopped responding. I then proceeded to restart. Upon logging back in I am greeted with a black screen and the same message box. After one minute there was no restart, so I pressed the restart button again. This time there was no Windows startup screen. Instead there was a blue screen. I set a restore point recently, so that was my relief. I wasn't too relieved however after running the Startup Repair twice without it asking me to restore. The third time it had finally asked me to, but all was not well. I was able to log in, but everything was very slow. Norton would not open, USB drives would not work, and explorer.exe would freeze if I right clicked anything. So I restarted in Safe Mode. I was able to run a scan, but it was interrupted. How? A loose power cable on my computer. I removed my external hard drive to see if it still worked on another computer, and in the process of doing so I bumped the cable and my computer shut off. At this point nine tracking cookies had been found, so I decided to boot normally without any internet connection. Norton now worked, but the other problems were still present. I ran a full system scan, which picked up eight more tracking cookies, and a "Heuristic Virus"(Which is Norton's way of saying 'I'm guessing this is a virus.'), which was a 'Suspicious.MH690.A'. I believed that was a false positive, but I let it go. Explorer.exe now works perfectly, and I am currently typing this from the said computer that was infected. My final thoughts are: COINCIDENCE????

tl;dr version:

Got a trojan while looking through the Skulltag Drama thread, which caused hours of frustration.