Malware prevents FM from opening?

[Norvin]

Yesterday morning when we opened Filemaker (on 3 different computers) the same dialog box appeared on all 3 systems with the following message:

“The feature you are trying to use is on a CD-Rom or other removable disk which is not available.”

So I went through the control panel, add remove software and did a repair using the original install disk. This seemed to correct the problem until the computers were restarted again. Same message appeared on all three computers. I went through the same procedure above and Filemaker opened, no problem until another restart. I also tried a clean install of Filemaker, same thing after a restart.

Let me add, because I think it’s related, that same morning I ran a virus scan that remove 11 instances of malware that I’ve never seen before called Trojan.Agent/Gen-Nullo(short). Identical readings on all 3 computers. A reboot was required to remove the malware and that’s when the problem first appeared. On a forth computer we ran the same spyware scan and Trojan.Agent/Gen-Nullo(short) was not found and there was no problem with Filemaker.

I assume that this is malware related but at this point it only seems to be affecting Filemaker and the malware appears to be gone. Has anyone else experienced this problem or can you provide any suggestions on how to correct it. I appreciate your help.

[Wim Decorte]

Where are the files located and how do you open them? Is FileMaker Server involved?

What OS on the workstations?

The message you're getting is what happens when the file's attributes is set in the OS to be read-only. You right-click on the file (make sure it's not currently open) and uncheck the read-only flag on it.

[Norvin]

The FM file is on a dedicated host (peer to peer, OS- XP Pro). Other client machines are able to open the file no problem. On the infected (?) computers we cannot even open the Filemaker program file so I don't think there is a problem with the host file.

I have discovered the file that seems to be trashed each time the computers are rebooted. This surfaced after I ran CCleaner. The missing file is DL61ACE.dll or at least, that is the message I got when I tried to open FM. Again, after reboot I can do a repair through the control panel's add/remove software with the FM install disk and everything is fine until we have to reboot the computer.

As I stated earlier the problem appears to be related to the scan and removal of malware called Nullo(short). So far the only evidence that it may still be viable is this reboot problem with FM. We have not yet encountered any other problems.

Thanks for your response. Any other ideas, anybody, short of reformatting the HD?

[Norvin]

I found the solution to the problem. I uninstalled the Spyware removal program and also removed the qurantine files. Evidently removing Nullo(short)originally either corrupted the spayware program, causing it to play havoc with FM or the quarantined malware was causing the problem. In either case, when I removed both, FM opened no problem.

Thanks