And now - can someone give me a really good recommendation for a program that will prevent this from ever happening again? I'm running Avast - and clearly, its not up to snuff.

Please see PROBLEM SOLVED thread - it has the solution. Touch - lock out this thread.

Free at last - free at last! To summarize: 1. Download malwarebytes on a clean computer and put on a flash drive. 2. Rename it to setup.exe 3. Drag it onto your infected computer 4. Install i ...

Ecstasy - Running Malwarebytes in safe mode under the administrator WORKED! Yahoo! I'm going to try running it in normal mode now - Thank you both for this help!

Ecstasy - Exact same outcome here. And I was hopeful! I'm letting it run in hopes that it will eventually open up and do its thing (the installation took a solid 10 minutes before it was done) ...