First off, apologies to those BYONDers on my MSN contacts list who downloaded this virus during its propagation stage (for those unaware of this, it propagates by sending an instant message to all contacts on your list in this format:

"omg this is so funny! [Link to a .pif file]")

I ran the file last night on my home machine after receiving the link from a friend of mine from school, Only after I ran it and enquired in chatters to what a .pif file was did I realise I had been infected by a virus. I downloaded AVAST! 4.6 Home Edition right away (Being foolish enough not to have any virus coverage) and installed.

I must now meekly request the help of all you kind, generous, magnanimous and all round awesome BYONDers to help me out here! My home computer is in a state of not workingness and I write to you from school. Follwoing is a full description in my actions to combat the problem:

PAST:
Seeing no ill effects from the DL of the .pif I didn't re-start to change my setting straight away, then all at once, I received messages from my friends on my contact list with the same format as I had recieve the message. Alarm bells rang in my head, I quickly logged out and rebooted to run AVAST! But unfortunately, on reboot my desktop loads up as usual but then seems to 'crash' and become unresponsive, Any attempt to click icons on the desktop or ctrl+alt+delete causes the desktop itself to become unresponsive (The mouse still moves on the screen) for the record i'm using Windows XP, service pack 2 installed.

I rebooted in safe mode, which loaded with no troubles (Also by the time I had rebooted into safe mode, I was no longer connected via network to the internet) and ran AVAST! on thorough with archive check activated over my hardrives (This took a while so I went to bed as it worked), when I woke up it had found a virus, which I promptly deleted (I think it was in my Mirc.exe) and a bunch of files it was unable to read (Which were BYOND game .rsc's which I also deleted for good measure); I rebooted (expecting a fix) but it still crashed so I again started in safe mode and uninstalled all my junk programs (Y! Messenger, AOL Messenger and crap like that) Unfortunately, it would not allow me to uninstall MSN messenger while in safe mode (Which is where I beleive the problem to be arising from) after another unsuccessful reboot, I once again started in safe mode and logged onto my user (As apposed to the 'Administrator' account which I had done the last 2 times) and commenced another thorough scan with AVAST!.

PRESENT:
This was this morning, I left it running when I came to school, I'll check back in about an hour to see if it's found anything and try a reboot.

FUTURE:
My plans from here if this doesn't work are:
*Repair Install
-Using the Windows XP disk, my thinking is, this'll fix any damaged files that may be causing my startup to fail.
*Checkdisk
-This has worked for me before with a few other problems, maybe it'll help me now.

If those fail, I'm stumped, I really don't want to /FDISK it, I have a lot of stuff on it!
Thanks in advance for any shred of help you can spare!

-Thorg