CPU easily maxes out in WinXp Pro, IE slow loading

[gburlison]

I was recently the victim of a trojan. Apparently it was new, because I could not find any info about the symptoms that I was experiencing. The symptoms were:

1) A program named sdaaaaaa.exe tried to access the internet, but ZoneAlarm alerted me. I found sdaaaaaa.exe and some other files newly added to my system32 folder and deleted them even though AVG antivirus did not consider them as a trojan (yet).

2) After rebooting I noticed in task manager that cmd.exe was using a lot of resources and slowing down my computer. Since cmd.exe is a command prompt window, and I did not have a command prompt window open, I assumed that this was related to what ever sdaaaaaa.exe did.

I searched many differnent security related websites trying to figure out what was going on. I finally copied the hard drive and then did a clean install. After reinstalling everything, AVG offered an update that recognised this as a trojan.