Got all ready to send the e-mail, posted my message on the board and we got a power failure. Whole area out for four hours. I missed the European Championship Final!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, have had a look at the Sasser worm and there are six different versions of it, each one requiring a different fix tool. If you go to
Symantec Security Center
you can download them all. Sasser causes LSASS.EXE to crash, so it sounds like Sasser.
Download all the fix tools then run them one at a time, taking care to follow the instructions EXACTLY.
DON'T FORGET TO TURN OFF THE SYSTEM RESTORE FUNCTION IN XP. THE WORM WILL BE PRESENT IN ALL THE RESTORE POINTS THAT HAVE BEEN SAVED SINCE YOU GOT THE WORM. IF YOU RESTORE FROM ANY OF THESE YOU GET THE WORM BACK!!!!!
As soon as you're happy your system is clean, set a manual restore point.
The home version of ZoneAlarm is totally free, the ZoneAlarm Pro is a 30 day trial, but if you choose not to get it, you can still have the personal version. Also, Whatever's suggestion of getting Ad-aware is a great one too. Ad-aware removes sypware on your puter - programs that spy on you and send reports back to their "master". They can use up alot of your system resources and some are classified as "High Risk" because they act a bit like a worm. Ad-Aware will remove them all. I run it after EVERY connection to the net and usually find half a dozen or so of these wee blighters. I cleaned my friend's puter and she had 1081 of them, about a third of which were high risk - Aureate, Radiate, RedSherrif - you name it she had it and she'd only been online for 3 months!!!