I have just spent a week cleaning, reformating, reloading & tuning Win2KPro/SP4 on one of my laptops. Finally got the desktops like I wanted them, DSL was working great (without any SBC Yahoo software on the drive), VNC was working great, etc., and then I made the error of poking around on the SBC/Y DSL installation CD that I received on April
15th.In that I had been working with VNC and RealVNC, I noticed the following on the CD:
E:\\Setup\\SST\\Data\\VNC\\MotVNC.exe
I recall seeing something about MotVNC and that it used tightVNC, so I thought cool, I'll fire up the file and see what is in it. Clicked on the file and allowed it to install into its directory. In that directory it installed WinVNC, Putty & several other files. So far so good. Fired up WinVNC, and that seemed to work just fine. Then I noticed in the installation directory a file named VNCClean.exe. Like a fool I clicked on the file... and the rest is history.
VNCClean.exe started up, and the next thing I know the drive is going crazy, the icons start disappearing off of the desktop, running programs stop and the laptop acts as if it's going into shutdown mode. I powered off, and what I had left was about 10% of my WINNT directory, some left over remnents of a few other directories, and nearly 4Gb free space of a
4Gb+ drive. Win2KP recovery tried to work, but couldn't find enough left over to recover.To make a long story short; I low level partitioned & formated the disk and am now in the process of reloading Win2KP and rebuilding the system.
The ONLY good thing about all of this is that I was using the laptop to test and learn the basics of Win2KP. So I didn't actually have any really valuable data on it, yet -- just the time & effort of loading normal working programs, AV's, firewall, etc., and getting it tuned to the way I wanted it.
So Heads Up: whatever you do, DON'T run the VNCClean.exe file that gets extracted from the MotVNC.exe file, and yes, I should have known better than to run an untrusted file. Better yet, take the SBC/Yahoo Installer CD and mix it in with all of the AOL CD coasters, or use it as frisbee...