Ah, fresh from the Trojan war front. A couple of days ago, my computer started acting up — mostly Internet Explorer. I would load say, one page — the front page of Wikipedia, for example — and then try to look something up and I’d get blank white pages with the correct URL.
I ran NAV. I ran several spyware programs I have. They cleaned up over 397 files, but they didn’t do squat about this. I began to think I’d need to reinstall Explorer all over again (what a bitch). I finally used a secure system manager thing on a freeware basis — I can’t remember the name, just look up “secure system manager” or something, or use a non-secure one and locate the file I’m about to tell you about — and it told me that a “directpt.dll” file was using up a lot of resources and taking priority.
I did a quick search on “directpt.dll”. Apparently it’s part of a Trojan backdoor/haxdoor rootkit (for those who don’t speak jive, that’s “nasty virus-like thing that lets people control your computer from afar”). So I quarantined the bastard, deleted it, and behold, everything is back to normal…except all my icons now look generic.
To fix *this*, I just opened up display properties and resized the icons from small to large and then back again. This forces Windows to rebuild the desktop. This hung after a while, so I tried a hard boot to see if it was working at all and — it completely fixed the problem.
Anyway…maybe this will help someone down the line.