email address book harvesting

[merlin]

an elderly lady friend, rang and said her computer was running really slow, so went to see, found junk just about everywhere, cleaned out unused programs etc, used ccleaner more junk gone.
better but still slow, checked email folders , found thousands of email addresses, and she says i don,t know these people.

it seems everytime she receives an email, she also gets the full contents of the senders address book, which is then added to her address book

she also has two address books ,one normal one ,plus one called "group mail" . which i do,nt understand  (only one needed)

now i,ve heard of people being made into zombies or bots, and i wondered if this was the problem. (where email addresses are being harvested)

so ran the latest version of her antivirus (full version of AVG) found nothing significant.

emptied all the email folders , went home and sent a test email to her, sure enough she had also received the full contents of my address book.

can anyone tell me how this can happen, and better still how to fix it ??

i should have said earlier its vista

[Glenn]

Have you run Malwarebytes or Superantispyware on it?

[Rik]

Odd, Bob. I'd rather expect the sending machine to be infected and transfer the address book, rather than the other way round. It would be worth using an online scanner, eg Norton etc, just to double check, and also run Malwarebytes on both machines.

[Glenn]

You could also try a HiJackThis scan http://www.whatthetech.com/hijackthis/ tells you what to do

[merlin]

thanks glen and rik, i will run both those programs on monday when i,m there.

there was also the problem of the twoaccounts ,one being called "group", how do i get rid of that one so there is just the one "normal account". my thinking is to go to tools> accounts and delete the group one ,but not sure ?

[Rik]

It should work, Bob, but I'd get to the bottom of what's creating it first.