Recovering Corrupted Registry - Completely lost :(

After a stupid comedy of errors, I'm in a very ugly situation.

While browsing with Firefox I randomly get a virus notification, and a
program pops up masquerading as my windows. I ignore it, and kill the
process, named b.exe.

AVG reports infection after infection, and after cleaning them all it
mentions that I'm required to restart to finish the process. I go to
restart, but it's taking forever, and in my impatience I hit the power
button.

Now windows won't boot - even in safe mode - and it keeps crashing on
some ***disk.sys file when trying to boot in safe mode. In normal mode,
it blue screens with an error about failing to load a registry cluster.

I used a vista cd to do a recovery, and the automatic recovery failed.

I then accessed the recovery command prompt and followed the directions
in this article:

'How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from
starting' (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545)

However, I couldn't delete the files, because apparently some process
was using them. CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't bring up the process menu in
recovery mode, and i tried the commands ps, process,pskill and others to
no avail.

So now, in my desperation - I'm just running a chkdsk in recovery mode
and it's taking forever. I'm all out of ideas. Does anyone know anything
I can do? I have access to the registry, but I couldn't find the keys
associated with the virus.


--
davidsakh

Considering how deeply you're infected, I'd save all docs/data and reformat
disk/reinstall Windows provided you have the recovery or original disks,
then run a massive (e.g. overnight) update process for Windows & all
applications, then restore data.
I am sure you will get more responses here, but I see your infection is on a
level which may deserve giving up and cleaning up entire harddisk and
reinstalling all....

I only trust Symantec NortonAV + PCtools SpywareDoctor, don't know anything
about AVG; also I only activate these during occasional scans but normally
their real-time protection is turned off as I habitually disable all
software and am a minimalist, because the kind of applications we run here
(Engineering CAD) require all possible resources upward to 16GB memory!

Unless you're too lazy to go thru this ordeal.... in which case wait for
more responses.
If I were you I'd frantically start saving DOCUMENTS (user's data) - in my
case it's 40GB.
I am not joking - 40 Gigabyte of letters, designs, diagrams,
emails/voicemails, images, etc.; engineering apps create giant data
files....
And I'd be suicidal if I lose it, so it's backed up to 3 storages - all at
remote locations from my garage to home to California 2000 miles away.

Make sure you don't lose data, the rest can go to hell - reinstall it,
you're really really infected beyind fixing.