So I get to work today and I’m not sure what happened last night because in about 5 seconds of use my background went solid blue and I started getting “Antivirus” software popping up telling me that my computer was at risk. Well duh – because I didn’t install any new antivirus software…

Anyway it became clear this was gonna be a bit more than some spyware removal because when I went to change my background back from this blue color I was missing both my desktop tab and screensaver tab from my Display Properties. Not good. I ran CCleaner to repair registry problems as well as look for anything shady in the add/remove problems. No help. I ran my AVG scanner (even though it’s running in the background) but before I found anything with AVG I fixed the problem with HijackThis.

The problem files were lphc3tmj0etn6.exe as well as some other garbled alphabet soup viruses. I removed them but that still didn’t help my missing tabs problem. Did some google searching and came across this problem solver.

1. click ‘start’ then ‘run’
2. type in ‘regedit’
3. click HKEY_CURRENT_USER, then ‘software’, then ‘microsoft’, then ‘windows’ then ‘currentversion’, then click ‘policies’, and finally click ‘system’
4. double click the files NoDispBackgroundPage and NoDispAppearancePage and change their value from 1 to 0
5. close regedit

I also then did a Windows Search for lphc3tmj0etn6.exe and all the other alphabet soup names I had seen during the whole process to make sure there were no traces left behind.

Hope this helped anyone else who had the same issue!