re: project seti@home

every time boinc sends message back and forth to seti-mother-ship, my computer gets reinfected with the Sysguard malware.

Is this according to your AV software?
Which one do you use?

And are you SURE that you keep getting the virus, or are you taking the AV's word for it? Because it's most likely a false positive that the AV people need to fix.

no sorry...it is not my av software (mcafee). I actually get all the pop up messages about my computer is at risk, and sysguard appears in my system tray. I struggled trying to figure out what was causing the re-infestation, and finally realized, I could exactly correlate the creation date of c:\windows\sysguard.exe to every time my Boinc-mgr communicated back with mother-ship.

I have explictly scanned all the files in c:\program files\boinc using mcafee, and it shows clean.

Seti won't be the source of the infection. Not only do they run completely on Linux, which can't be infected in any way, but if they were sending things like that out, there would be lots more people shouting hell and high water.

My suspicion is that you never got rid of it in the first place. What did you use to remove it with?

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First, this infection has nothing to do with Seti or Boinc. Time to do a little bit of googling. This is a very insidious type of infection and very adept at hiding. It is very difficult to eradicate completely. It can hide all over your system under various names. This including amoung others places, your system restore files, temporary files folders and virtual memory on the hard drive. It will resurrect itself unless you manage to remove all its component at the same time. The longer it's on your system the harder it will be to get rid of. You are likely to need expert help.

AV software is fairly good at detecting problems, but not that great at fixing them.

Sorry for the false alarm - I had convinced myself the coindence of a re-infestation timed to coincide with Boinc messages was the cause.

disabled system_restore, and now running avert stinger, plus whatever else it takes.