So my mother-in-law got a virus

She's running Vista (I know), with Microsoft Security Essentials, and does most of her surfing in AOL. She got an email purportedly from IRS.gov, clicked on a link inside, and boom.

It's the pc performance and stability analysis report, I believe.

Here's the issue. When she tries to run MSE, it gives an error message. Explorer has disappeared, but she still has Firefox. When she tries to download malwarebytes, another error message.

Since all the advice I'm finding on Google involves doing those two things, I'm kinda stuck. I'd put MWB on a thumb drive and put it on her pc that way, but she's two states away.

Help please.

:hi:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/anti-virus/rkill


RKill - What it does and What it Doesn't - A brief introduction to the program http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic308364.html

I got her onto bleepingcomputer.com through firefox, but she couldn't see past the pop-up banner that instantly covered it. Banners also popped up over other internet sites. It's telling her that her hard-drive is defective, personal data can be lost, yadda, yadda, and after she hit the "fix it" button (which she had done before calling us), it asked for her computer registration number and visa card number. hmmmm....
I was working with mom over the phone to see what was going on; we checked her programs, and Microsoft Security Essentials had disappeared from her directory, as well as any other security programs besides the shell of the long-defunct Norton. What worries me is that this has been on her computer since last night, when she opened the e-mail just before she went to bed. She apparently was able to use the computer fine in the morning initially, she checked her bank account( :( ) and logged onto the AO-Hell e-mail account she was using, and it was when she was in the middle of checking that, that all the banners and flashing icons started popping up on her screen.

Hopefully, it's just a phish looking for a credit card number, and not a keystroke logger or serious trojan. I did what I could, but between the distance, her inexperiance and uncertainty with the computer, and the damn banner blocking everything, she's decided to call in a computer tech to clean it up. Luckly, she does most all her banking in checks or face to face (she does nothing online financially other than checking the balances), and her credit cards are not credit/debit linked to one of her accounts, but full on credit.

I would have tried to create a new user account for her and had her move over there while figuring what to do with her virus, but she was so distressed after a half hour or so over the phone, she decided it would be better to have someone over to show her what to do as they were fixing it for her.

Any ideas if this was more than just a credit card phishing trip? I'm scared it might be a more serious trojan.

Anyone know a good tech in Albuquerque?

Haele

Or does she have really important data that has to be saved ?

If so.... I know no one in Albuquerque, sorry.

But the computer was Dad's domain for the most part, and there's a lot of stuff on there that she still has to go through, as well as anything she may have saved from e-mail since we did the back-up.
I don't think she wants to nuke the hard-drive; not only is there a sentimental issue going on, she hasn't used a computer since 2002 when she retired from the university, and she's feeling very lost about the whole thing. I think they were still on Windows 3.1 or 95 at best when she left, so she hasn't caught up with much of the technology yet.
She's terrified of "blowing the computer up".

Hopefully, a tech will be able to fix it.

Haele