W32/Lovsan.worm.a

[trantin]

I have a system that recently became infected with
W32/Lovsan.worm.a. The system has been disinfected and
the required patch applied. However, I am not
experiencing problems with Word. Everytime I open Word
it automatically shuts down indicated an error in
WinWord.exe. I have completely uninstalled Office and
used Microsoft's Eraser2K file to clean the registry and
system files. After reinstalling Office I am still
experiencing the error.

Any suggestions?

 

[Mark Tangard]

trantin,

You don't need to do that. Visit microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
which is currently getting approx 1500 posts per day, a decent chunk
of them from the XP MVPs, most notably Kelly, who has posted a VERY
easy-to-follow set of fixes (including fixes for the fixes) on her
website.

--
Mark Tangard <[email protected]>, Microsoft Word MVP
Please reply ONLY to the newsgroup, not by private mail.
Note well: MVPs do not work for Microsoft.
"Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." --John Waters

 

[Mark Tangard]

It's needlessly depressing advice for someone already beseiged
by a serious problem. It also isn't the only way. If it were,
there'd be as much demand for a wipe-reformat-reinstall utility
as for antivirus software.

 

[Mark Tangard]

At a computer manufacturer it would be. When you advise real
people whose jobs demand attention to dozens of other matters
all day long, flippantly suggesting a total reinstall whenever
something smells bad is simplistic, unrealistic, and alienating.

There's no reason to tell this guy to wipe and reinstall until
all other avenues are exhausted. Even on the ms.pub.xpgeneral
newsgroup, which is receiving all manner of distress messages,
one only rarely sees anyone recommend a total reinstall.

 

[sf]

Unfortunately, that's what a lot of these "support" people
suggest. I just laugh at them and more or less shame them
into figuring out my problem rather than taking the easy way
out.

I don't do complex things to my computer, so if they know
any more than I do... they should be able to figure it out.
Unfortunately, too many of them just flip pages in a manual
and hope they sound like they know what they are talking
about.

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[Mark Tangard]

I've never seen a reinstall I could call "quick" by any stretch,
even for those rare folks who are meticulous about making
backups, keeping their program installation CDs, etc. But even
if reinstalls went quickly, it's still profoundly unreasonable
to suggest them early in an investigation. Above all, it's just
damn lazy -- it makes the support person's job very easy at the
expense of the user.

The equivalent behavior in these newsgroups would be to tell
novice users that they must reinstall Office every time they
have any of the reucurrent nontrivial problems we see here,
e.g., Word won't open, funny messages on close, etc. If we
answered user-trauma questions in the simplistic way the
Reinstaller Chorus does, these groups would be pretty useless.

MT