>>The program could delete all of the files on a person's computer, use zombie PCs -- those controlled by a master -- to overwhelm and shut down Web sites or monitor a person's keyboard strokes to collect private information like passwords or bank account information, experts said.
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>>http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/24/conficker.computer.worm/
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>>It was on the local news again today. Supposedly, if you can navigate to the most popular anti-virus sites, then you are not infected. One of the things it does is block those sites.
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>The symptoms described are very similar to teh problems I had a few weeks ago. Windows and AVG auto. updates were disabled, any attempt to manually go to their sites and download - I was getting "Cannot access page" type messages.
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>I had a hell of a time immunizing agin it and now my pc is thrashing the disk constantly, and everything takes forever (eg you can wait 5+ minutes for Firefox to load up, closing or minimising a window you see it happen in slow motion)
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>I haven't a clue what's thrashing the disk all the time. There are several AVG????.??? processes on the go now since, but I can't ID what's what.
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>In short my pc is practically unusable co0s it takes an age to do anything.
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>BTW if anyone has any insight to this I'd appreciate it. I'm, of course, not on my home m/c at the mo.
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>AFAIK I've not got any of teh other tools I used to get rid of the malware (eg PC Doctor et al) set as running (and clashing with AVG) but there seems to be some fishy looking anti-virus resident processes going on.

Some of the nastier modern malware will actually install a "rootkit" on your machine. This is invisible to AV software, antispyware programs etc. and requires specialized rootkit detection/removal software such as http://www.gmer.net/

Some of these malware programs are so serious, and hard to eradicate, you're better off restoring from your last known good image backup, or wiping your disk(s) and reinstalling everything from scratch.