Do I Have This Trojan Or Not?

[Trout]

I ran Spybot S&D this morning and it found the usual couple mild things and was able to take care of them. No problem.

But....

It said it also found Zlob.Downloader trojan. I googled this and got some info on how to remove it. I always read several sites on removal instructions before doing anything. They all said pretty much the same thing. Several steps were invovled. I had to kill any running processes that had this trojan in it. The web sites listed what to look for and how to do it. Then it said to unregester some DLL files. Told me how and what to look for. Then it said to delete some regestry entries using REGEDIT. Again told me what to look for and how to do it. Then it gave a freeware removal tool. I had to shut off Restore, reboot in safe mode, run this removal tool, reboot and turn Restore back on. And that would be that.

However, even though Spybot says it initially found this trojan and couldn't remove it itself, I could not find any OTHER indication it was on my system. I followed the steps above. There were no processes running that I was told to look for, none of the DLLs I was told to shut off were running, and none of the regestry changes they said I would find were there. I could find absolutely NO EVIDENCE of this trojan on my system except for the initial Spybot "supposed" discovery.

I then ran a virus scan using AVG, found nothing. I then ran Malwarebytes (another program like Spybot) and it found a couple minor things but no big badass trojan. Windows defender was some how shut off about a month ago (don't know how) and I discovered this while trying to figure this whole mess out. I updated Defender and turned it back on.

This all took a coupel hours with reading and scanning several times etc etc and I ran out of time this morning. I have not been able to run Spybot again to see what it finds.

Given the above story what do you guys think? Was this some sort of "false-positive" that Spybot got or what?

In short Spybot found this trojan but could not remove it. I read half a dozen different anti-virus etc sites to get info on how to remove it. All the steps they listed were basically the same but upon my initial investigation I could not see or find any other evidence that the trojan was actually there.

Thoughts?

[GreyKnight]

Windows defender was some how shut off about a month ago (don't know how)

Trout,

Most 3rd party anti-virus programs will turn off Windows Defender when they are installed. As it is best to have only 1 anti-virus running at once.

Have you tried Microsoft's free Security essentials?

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

p.s. If in doubt, I always do an online scan -> http://housecall.trendmicro.com