posted 04-08-99 01:28 AM ET        

My system was infected with CIH (It was found in the first version of winamp 2.0... That's where my friends got it) and though my virus scanners seemed to pick it up when I asked it to there were some problems. First of all CIH likes to hide in your system memory then attach itself to programs you open up. Second, it likes to attach to explorer.exe which normal virus scanners do not have the ability to fix. So it appeared to me everything was fixed, and even when I ran scans on the SMAC directory...

What to do? Well a slight combination of making sure you use something to kill CIH from memory (kill_cih.exe worked) before scanning. If you have it infected on a explorer.exe or taskman.exe you MUST use a bootdisk with the proper utilities to do so. Mcaffe didn't work well... though Nortan Antivirus came with an EMERGENCY disk which you boot from and are able to disinfect all files (including explorer.exe) What happened was it hid in memory and explorer to only expand further as I continued to use it. Viruses are nasty.

After this is fixed you must whipe your game directory and reinstall (with no CIH on your system at all.) that seemed to do the trick just fine. The most important part is using a special boot disk to clean the system...contact your virus scanner software developer...

Also... If you need kill_cih... go to:

http://castor.tamu.edu/vscanner/killcih/

and download that. I hold no responsibility for that site or it's contents. Don't ask me if you can't connect or have problems with that software... But hopefully it'll help

Firaxis: Perhaps you might want to include this site and more detailed instructions on your website. It would be helpful because it took some time to figure out that I needed a boot disk...but please don't nerve staple me for giving an opinion!