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Good afternoon,

I made the mistake of installing the vlc media player and not noticing the malware bundled with it. My wife is amused that "Mr. Computer" messed up this badly...

I removed stij.exe by booting to safe mode and removing it. Unfortunately it intercepted network traffic. Now there is no network connectivity.

I've reinstalled the network driver from the manufacturer's disk. When I try to create a new network connection it tells me there is no networking hardware. Many of the networking related services will not start.

ipconfig shows a NIC but I can't do anything with it. Any suggestions how to recover from this?

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  • open the command prompt with Administrator privileges and run sfc /scannow this should fix it, if not try a little app called Comboxfix, it can be found with a simple google search....
    – TheXed
    Oct 17, 2013 at 20:47
  • I tried that. sfc will not run. more damage by the virus I think
    – Jay
    Oct 17, 2013 at 20:59
  • Did you try Combofix like I said?
    – TheXed
    Oct 17, 2013 at 21:21
  • I finally got home to the machine and tried combofix. That fixed the issue. If you'd like to create an answer instead of a comment I can give you the big green check mark for the fix. :)
    – Jay
    Oct 18, 2013 at 0:41
  • There you go :-D
    – TheXed
    Oct 18, 2013 at 1:30

2 Answers 2

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Open the command prompt with Administrator privileges and run sfc /scannow this should fix it.

If not try a little app called Comboxfix, it can be found with a simple google search....

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There is most likely another program called sweetim.exe hiding somewhere in the system.
You will need to delete that too (from safe mode).
They usually come in pairs.

After that reboot back in normal mode. If the network is still a problem go into the device manager, delete the network card listed there and reboot. After reboot Windows should re-detect the network card and re-install the drivers.
This should also fix the other network problems. (You should do "sfc /scannow" as TheX suggested too, just to be safe.)

stij.exe is officially not a virus (it doesn't copy itself to other computers) so most anti-virus programs leave it be...
But it is a very nasty piece of malware that causes more problems than most viruses do.

By the way: The safe way to get VLC is to download it from www.videolan.org

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  • I did find a sweetiminstallvalidator.exe in the user/appdata/temp directory but that didn't fix it. Thank you very much for the help
    – Jay
    Oct 18, 2013 at 0:42

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