I recently had to clean up a case of MS Antivirus 2009. As usual, I went straight for Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware program.

However, when I clicked on the mbab-setup.exe icon nothing happened.

After a bit of research I found that this is because some variants of the Antivirus 2009 spyware will actually block the installation of certain spyware cleaners.

The easy fix for this is to rename the mbab-setup.exe program to something else — like joe.exe.

This allowed me to install Ma’ls program — with one caveat. I could only install the program from Safe mode and I could only run the application from Normal mode!

Be that as it may, Mal’s program was able to clean up the majority of the Antivirus 2009 spyware and I later ran SuperAntispyware to clean up the rest of the spyware bit and pieces.

*Note – Antivirus 2009 infections could also have TDSServ Rootkit infections so keep an eye out of TDSSxxx files in the c:\windows\system32 directory. One of their side effects will be a hijacked browser so if you see any TDSSxxx files in that system32 directory then manually delete them if you have to.