Vista - IE stopped working - constant reboot

I wonder if somebody can help. My very elderly dad who is not pc literate seems to have a trojan. It's difficult to tell as I don't live nearby so have been unable to look at his laptop. My sister-in-law visited at the weekend and tried to download some media software and half way through she told my dad it couldn't be done and left it. Since then he's been unable to access the internet - error message "IE has stopped working" and the laptop just continually reboots. He is running Vista Home. Somebody else had a look and told him he has a trojan. He can't actually get the laptop to start up so that he can run an anti-virus (not even sure if he has one).
I need something simple and easy that I can talk him through over the phone. He has contacted PC world but can't afford their health check at the moment.
Any help would be much appreciated.

thanks caroline

try one of the antivirus web sites like norton or panda.com and do there free virus scans some of them will remove them for free they all will tell you if there is a virus or trojan. then go from there.

thanks for your reply - he can't get on the internet though because windows just keeps rebooting. I talked him how to go to last known good configuration but it still does system reboot. He says there is an icon of a shield in the bottom middle of the screen. Could it be a dodgy microsoft update?

biyacollins,

This is difficult. I would really want to help, but I find it very risky to advice under these circumstances. I think someone has to sit by the computer, or at least nearby, and report back what is going on, and what happens as we troubleshoot.

What color is the sheild? i hope it is not a green one and ask him if it is system guard?. i think that is the name of the fake anit virus program. well here it goes try to talk him through boot up to safe mode. If he can try a system restore point to right before all this happened by date.

If you can't get into windows I don't think there is much you can do over the phone. Sounds like a job for the utilities disk.

forget pc world their useless , they'll most likely just reformat it , or replace hardware till it fixes itself

who told him he has a trojan? how did they figure that one out?


can he boot into safemode? (continually tap F8 OR F5 at bootup then select safemode from the resulting list (using the up down arrows on his keyboard and enter to select)

if he can we can then tell you how to disable the reboot on serious error option in windows (one of the most pointless options) and disable all his startup items and try and troubleshoot from there