Worst malware infection I’ve seen in years

I’m now working on the worse infection I’ve seen in years.  I’m early in the process, but here are some symptoms:

Once I cleaned the malware up in Safe Mode using AVG Free 8 (which was not easy at all), when I rebooted in to Windows XP, I could no longer run any EXE files.  When I tried to open the Control Panel, it said “C:\windows\explorer.exe Application Not Found.”

I couldn’t find anything on Google that helped me with that message.  I did find this, which fixed that symptom:

http://dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm

I downloaded the EXE file association fix, unzipped it to a floppy disk and was able to run the REG file on the broken computer, and now I can run executable files again.

Back to work on it!