Five year old laptop has been acting kind of of slow lately. Then we went to Cedar Pointe last weekend and rented a cabin with wireless. Got home and my computer virtually ground to a halt. Opened task manager and went to performance and saw that the CPU was running at 100% with no programs open. Clicked on resource monitor and saw many rundll.exe programs running with the description com surrogate. Also my permissions had changed so I couldn't download the latest version of Norton Eraser. Not that it would have done any good. I already scanned it with Norton and Speedy PC Pro: nothing. Really debated what to do with this 5 year old computer. Wasn't planning on replacing it for a few more years, so I bit the bullet and paid Norton $99.99 to have a tech crawl through my computer to fix it. They said it would take 60-90 minutes while they accessed it remotely (obviously from India). 4 hours later they declared it fixed. Meantime I left and wasn't home when they finished, so I allowed them to close out the case as they claimed I was now 100% virus free. NOT.
So they reopened the case tonight at 6:15 and finally by 11:30 they seemed to have really fixed it this time. Nine hours, don't think they made any money on that one. The tech said the com surrogate is a very complex virus and it takes many iterations and scans to remove it. Not something you are going to fix yourself. Makes you want to strangle the hackers that think up these viruses, and screw up everybody's life just because they can.