Apparently got a virus wednesday, discovered it yesterday, still trying to clean it

Not sure who to contact about this, but I have a virus that MSE identified at one point as potentially Sirefef.Y

Initially, it looked like my Security Essentials service and my firewall had been turned off, but actually it had removed the security essentials service. The firewall cannot be turned on. I uninstalled/reinstalled security essentials, but it immediately

went into shutdown mode (critical error - 1 minute). I booted into safe mode, command window and it immediately went into 1 minute shutdown. I did it again and started typing "shutdown -a" almost immediately. The virus command to shutdown apparently loops

because, for several minutes, while I continued to type "shutdown -a" it stayed up but as soon as I stopped looping the command, it turned off a few moments later.

I booted to a different (laptop) hard drive that hadn't been installed in the machine for months, updated the security essentials definitiions on that drive and started a scan of my "real" drive. The last message I saw on the scan before falling asleep (it

wasn't complete yet) was that a potential hazard had been found, but nothing was showing up on the history tab. This morning, security essentials wasn't running. It showed up in my system tray until I tried to click on it to open --- then it disappeared. I

still have (had?) the program in my start menu, but when I clicked on it it brought up the searchlight messagebox that it was looking for the program. Trying to reinstall security essentials, I get the message that another installation is currently in progress.

I have not rebooted the machine but have just finished downloading msert.exe and will be trying this next.

Got my fingers crossed, but if you have any pointers/steps to try next if msert fails, I would appreciate it....

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