Bitdefender 2012 Infected

I believe my copy of 2012 Plus was infected last week when my daughter borrowed my work computer to check Facebook. I cannot be certain of that, but here's what happened. I started to get errors being reported as file access violations in Bitdefender message dialogs. I sent, or responded as such, these error reports to BD. I thought I might have a bad disk sector, but between CHKDSK /F and a disk utility I've used for a number of years, nothing broken was reported. The next thing I did was to purchase Bitdefender Plus 2013 as I was starting to get concerned that something was just not right. The process of uninstalling 2012 and installing 2013 appeared to complete fine, but then I started to see failures in the Bitedefender services like bdagent. When I tried to uninstall 2013, I started to have issues that I should not have since I was using an Administrator account. Using 3rd party software, I did a forced uninstall of 2012 that appeared to work until the Bitdefender tray icon came back on a subsequent reboot! When I went into the Services management console or in Windows Explorer to delete BD files, change property settings, etc. I was always unable to do/change anything even though this was not the case for other files/programs. I had also tried a System Restore, but that too failed and rolled-back. I tried using various Sysinternals tools, but nothing allowed me to get the better of whatever had taken root (pardon the pun).

What did seem to work - surprisingly so - was the downloadable uninstaller from the Bitdefender site itself. I no longer have any remains of BD 2012, and as long as that stays as such, I will re-install BD 2013. What a hassle this was...

If someone else has this issue (Windows 7 x64), hopefully the same approach will help.

Russ