It turns out I was right, the program “Internet Security 2010″ from Kaspersky was what crashed my computer.

According to the guys at PC Fix, that program has actually been a bane to a number of people and resulted in the same thing that happened to me. A complete re-install of Windows. The software downloads itself, screws with Windows, and you can’t do anything on your computer or with it unless you choose to play by the software’s rules and pay to activate the software.

Be advised, the anti-virus programs like AVG, Norton, McAfee, and Avira have trouble blocking it and the software itself, if installed, can hamper and disable virus protection.

The way I got it was through a popup that loaded on a file sharing site (Rapidfire I believe). When the popup loaded it said it was scanning my computer for problems. I tried to close the popup and received an alert button that gave me the option to continue the scan and stay on the page by clicking “cancel” or purchasing the software by hitting “buy”. Obviously Neither of those were what I wanted to do so I ultimately had to alt +ctrl + delete it and close out Firefox entirely. The program still managed to download itself though and screwed up everything though.

PC Fix was able to recover some of my data for me, and now I’m stuck re-installing Windows updates (like the service packs) and the programs I just can’t live without (Photoshop!). My humongous music collection is gone though, I was more concerned that the files under my Documents and Pictures folders be recovered as that had my layouts, projects in progress, and business documentation, and other important things and this was a lot of data to recover as well.

And what did it cost? Including labor, tax, and data recovery (which included a backed up copy on a dvd) the total came out to…. $63 dollars. Not bad really, but when you don’t have money to spend it still hurts. Still though, PC Fix was awesome. Took it it Monday morning and it was ready for pick-up late Monday evening, and there were a lot of people ahead of me to boot. So you know they were slaving away to maintain their “ready in one business day” motto that they aim for. No need for anti wrinkle treatments with these guys, they take the stress away and keep you from fretting over a ridiculous sized bill to boot. Love ‘em!

And my music library, all 20gb is gone and I just can’t be bothered to re-install it all on the laptop either. I’ve installed some tunes, but not much. It’s not even 1gb! Mostly it’s just anime and movie soundtracks right now.

So yeah, beware of Internet Security 2010 software from Kaspersky. Whatever you do, avoid sites that support it and advertise it as there might be popups or other ads there that try to download it onto your computer.