I go hit by some type of infection due to a flash player exploit and I think it made my hard drive unbootable. I ended up putting in a new hard drive and after getting what I needed off the old one just reformatted it which seemed to kill the infection. I needed to clean up my computer anyway and everything is running much faster than it used to. I just put the reformatted hard drive into another computer after checking the drive for viruses and bad sectors (it found none). I guess it’s fixed.
If you see any messages that pop up that says you need to upgrade your flash player program DON’T do it. The hackers made it look like the link went to www.adobe.com. I think they were just able to make the browser show a false address.
You can go directly to the Adobe website and upgrade your flash player, instead of clicking the pop-up.
I once got a a virus that made web browsing almost impossible, among other things. My antivirus didn’t find it. I ended up having to Google fixes (fun, when the browser is taking 5 minutes to load up because of a virus). I managed to delete the virus and fix some of the registry changes it had made, but I was never able to get that computer to work right again. The virus had made it impossible to log in as an administrator on that computer.