Microsoft won't let me use Firefox or Chrome-tells me they're both dangerous trojans!

the Microsoft Security Essential all of a sudden decided my Firefox is a unknown virus/trojan and wont le me run it in User mode at all. I can freely use Firefox as Administrator fine though. SO I decided to d/l Chrome and tried that but Microsoft started screaming it was trojan too. How do I turn the darn thing OFF and make it allow me to use Forefox? I'm currently forced to run in Administrator mode but that's dangerous due to viruses.

It shouldn't be doing that, you may have the infamous virus / trojan that mimics MSE.

Try an online scan and see what pops up. http://www.bitdefender.com/scanner/online/free.html

Kaspersky also offers a free online scan but it's temporarily out of service.

thax I ran the bitdefender and it did find a Trojan in temp and after deleting it firefox can start up again. Wow.

In the future, if you need it, ESET also has an excellent online scanner, it completely scans your computer. It takes over two hours for it to full scan mine.

But I'm glad that you got rid of that nasty Trojan, had you clicked the fake MSE to clean it, there's no telling what would happen. I got one of those nasty viruses using Safari once, it took hold and didn't want to let go.

Cat

Thanks for the reminder Cat! I completely forgot about the ESET online scanner.

You're welcome. Actually I ran across it by chance, I was intending on purchasing ESET AV software. Then I found this scanner. I run it weekly, in addition to my MSE protection, and MBAM 1.50 (Beta).

It's not "realtime" protection, but is still a quite useful tool.

Cat

If you can get to another machine I would download the several versions of RKill to a flash drive and then on your machine try to run them.

I have partitioned my hard drive into several partitions: C:\ for OS and D:\ for data. Usually I don't think it is necessary to scan the data files unless they were d/led from dangerous places. Seems the majoroty of the new vtorjans and viruses are send to and reside in the /temp directory. Is it really necessary to scan simple data files such as jps and some movies? It will take forever.

Many viruses attach themselves to other types of files such a jpg (pictures) for instance. You can start with your C: drive but if you truly believe you were hit with a virus I would do a complete scan. In fact I would do a complete scan with my anti-virus and with malwarebytes and with spybot search & destroy. Then reboot and run a quick scan again with the anti-virus. Not only that but scan all flash drives and any disks burned during the time in question.

Much of this can be set to run overnight.

It is HIGHLY recommended to scan all files on your system!

I know this may seem redundant and such, but in your situation you need to do this.

Depends on the AV software you have and the scanning engines used as to how fast the scan takes. On my system a complete scan takes about 40 minutes over 5 partitions withing 2 500GB hard drives.

Also I noticed you have your D drive as a data drive, traditionally the D drive is reserved for the CD/DVD drives, also E if you have two CD/DVD drives. You can change the driver lettering in the Disk Management section of the System Administration section of Control Panel.

This is how mine is setup: