This is what happened...
there was an issue on Sunday where the quite essential user32.dll file was wrongly detected as Trojan Horse PSW. banker4.APSA. I too was believing that the file was really a Trojan Horse and healed the file. Thinking everything was fixed, I wanted to check if my windows Firewall was running properly. It was then I noticed something was wrong, as I got an error message that the security panel could not be accessed due to missing user32.dll file.
I have Windows XP Professional ServicePack 2 (Dutch language edition as the computer was bought in my former home country Belgium).
Following problems occur:
- no access to the security settings in my Control Panel
- I cannot open a new browser session with Internet Explorer, however I can still browse using the IE window which was running before the virus warning came (luckily I did not close the IE window)
- I cannot empty the cache or delete cookies, temp internet files and URL history
- I cannot open Notepad, Paint, etc
- when opening Run and typing cmd it does not work
- when clicking the microphone icon on the bottom right to change the volume, I cannot load the volume settings
each time the error message came that my user32.dll file was missing.
I could not open the AVG regularly and could not access the virus vault to restore the files, I could only see there are 2 files in the vault but cannot access it.
As I do not have the Windows installation CD ROM I could not just replace the user32.dll file. I downloaded a user32.dll file from a site I found in google, but when copying this into my Windows32 and DLLCACHE folders I got the message that I was installing a non original variant of a vital file. It prompted me to run the installation CD instead, but I do not have this CD anymore. After installing this .dll file though I did not get the "missing user32.dll file" error message anymore though when opening a program; however no program or application opens, instead of the error message just nothing happens.
I then got the right user32.dll file from a friend but after placing this in the Windows32 and DLLCACHE folders, I tried to open a new browser session and got the error message that computer cannot retrieve entrypoint of procedure GdiGetBitmapBitsSize in .dll file GDi32.dll
Can somebody please tell me how to fix the problem? I am a real rookie and not familiar with system restore or safe mode (I am still in windows anyway, restarting may not be needed but I can just not run several applications or programs... I also dont know if I will still be able to log in to windows from the screensaver, as the Administrator password may also not work anymore due to the missing user32.dll file?)
I hope to avoid any loss or corruption of files on my hard drive as several thousands of photos, MP3s etc are stored on it.
I guess I somehow need to get the right user32.dll again, otherwise I guess rebooting in safe mode to restore the wrongly removed file from the virus vault is the only option. I never used safe mode before though so I am quite scared to do something wrongly and corrupt my own files
