This is a VERY nasty piece of malware. You CANNOT get rid of Braviax by simply deleting both files with that name in c:\windows and c:\windows\system32, or by unmarking it in MSCFG . On the next reboot or start, they will be back, along with everything else in the payload the nasty delivered. Braviax (which actually may have different names)is just part of the pack. One of my employees carelessly clicked on a link that came up in Google when she was searching for a church! The malware unpacked its payload. It scooted past our two active antivirus programs and firewall. Then it sent up a barrage of popups. Many were phony virus alerts; a click would have launched or downloaded more bad stuff. But some alerts also were coming from AVG, McAfee, and Windows. I quickly fired up AVG, it found an infection right away, but before the scan could complete, the virus disabled AVG. AVG and McAfee won't run now, not even in Safe Mode. The nasty also shut down our cable access to the Internet, hijacking our connection -- and started sending out ITS stuff from OUR PC. What a mess. It's going to take an expert to clean it out, damaged files will need to be reinstalled, and it may be that the best solution will be FORMAT C: and reinstall XP from scratch. The fact that we don't have a dedicated removal tool from any of the big antivirus publishers yet suggests how well the bad guys did their nasty work. Send Bill Gates back to the drawing board, with a stop in the woodshed along the way. ed p.

Revo uninstaller is sort of a combined way to uninstall programs and clean up the registry for that programs left overs and some of the left over files/folders it might leave. It's not always 100% effective but its better than windows uninstall - which is really just running the programmers uninstaller. You can try to use revo... I always run it on its most aggressive scan. . To me it sounds like you might need to reinstall AVG 12 the older version..... disable it.... uninstall it maybe with Revo first... then follow up with the AVG uninstall tool .. most want you to run that tool from safe mode. Here is a link that might be useful: www.revouninstaller.com

i finally installed oo 3.1 and it was able to open the spreadsheet. now getting 3.1 and getting it to work, well if you are interested that was a real interesting adventure! in case this helps anyone else i'll copy and paste it here. i posted this at the oo bullentin board, see link below. this is the final resolution: this is going to be difficult to explain but i have solved the problem and i have to admit i am impressed that i was able to do this! here's what i did after i posted this - 1st, instead of going to the web i opted to open an application i had. i clicked on oo 2.4 and it opened a window. from there i clicked on a link to do the download, 150 mb! it took about 45 minutes. but i still had ver 2.4. i realized i had to open the installation file that mozilla was showing me and when i double clicked the downloaded .exe or php file it started the install and i knew i was on the right track. that took a good 20 minutes and i told it to remove the 2.4 stuff. when done the icon for oo 3.1 writer on my task bar did not work! there are now 4 icons the 3.1 version put on my desktop. only the "oo org" 3.1 icon would launch oo and it was 3.1 so i could now use oo. but the other icons for impress, calc, writer and the task bar icon for writer all failed to work, they'd launch a window saying that it could not find "swriter.exe", trust me this is pretty confusing stuff for me! so i could get to oo 3.1 but only using the icon for "oo org" 3.1 so i right clicked the 3 icons that gave the swriter.exe error and looked at the properties. all 3 were going to C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 2.4\program which shouldn't exist as i told it to remove the 2.4 software but it did not put the correct target address for the 3.1 programs and i recognized this as screwy. i looked at the properties for the 1 icon that would launch oo 3.1 and the target was exactly the same as the 3 icon's targets that were 2.4 but it had 3 in the address - C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 3\program\swriter.exe so i changed the target in the icons that generated the can't find swriter.exe error. by doing that the 3 icons on the desktop went from being a white backround to bright colors and a larger icon! low and behold when i click on those 3 and the icon for the writer on the task bar each one launches the correct software! like i said, i am impressed i found this and was able to fix it, i can't imagine anyone would figure this out it just seems too cryptic! heck i even was able to open the spread sheet that started all this! i hate messing with stuff, i want it to work. i am not all that pc literate and i worry that if i change anything i'll mess something up. i have to admit this was NOT easy to do. oo does NOT provide a correct download/installation. if this happened to me it must be happening to everyone. so not only did this process fail to remove some 2.4 files but it loaded the incorrect target address for 3 icons (using the C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 2.4\program\swriter.exe address)! makes me wonder..... Here is a link that might be useful: open office setup trouble shooting forum

If you intend to continue with OO, I would suggest you uninstall what you have now then download and install the latest version. Depending on what happened during the crash, you may find that any .docs you had open when it occurred may be corrupted and unrecoverable. I remember having similar "registration" issues with OO and finally got fed up. I've since installed Libre Office and never looked back. Here's another thing to try: Use WORDPAD to open the .docs you were working on. If you can open them, make a few simple changes and save them. That might smooth things over when you try to reopen them in OO.