Richard, There was a thread last week about a fake antivirus that disabled task manager. It apparently disabled it via a registry key:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "DisableTaskMgr" Jeff On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:42 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have a desktop machine doing something troubling... > > It's a Dell PWS-380, WinXP-Pro SP2. > In an remote desktop session, I was wanting to see if a specific process > was running, so I right-clicked the task bar and chose TaskManager. I got > the hour glass icon for about a second, then nothing - for quite a long > time. > > I went to the desk and logged in locally. Same thing. I did a "chkdsk /f" > command and rebooted. > > Logging back in (locally) I did see a gray icon for VIPRE Enterprise. Its > agent version and definitions were current. I initiated a deep scan. > (Hopefully, none of this is relevent, but VIPRE/SBamSvc was the process for > which I was originally hunting.) So far, VIPRE has not detected any malware > (yet!). > > I still cannot run Task Manager on this machine - either by right-clicking > the task bar and selecting it, or by Ctrl-Alt-Del and clicking the Task > Manager button. > > SO, I go to the machine and run "taskmgr.exe". To that I get a response - > the file is not there. > > Any ideas as to what could have whacked that file? Thanks! > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
