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Most boot sector viruses detected by some of the best commercial antivirus software such as Symantec's Norton Antivirus, Microsoft's Security Essentials, or Kapersky's Antivirus can not be removed by these applications. And in many cases a boot sector virus is capable of alluding these applications unless the drive is connected to a clean system that has the AV software actively running.

What is a boot sector virus? This is a computer virus that infects a diskette or hard drive in the area which contains information about the configuration of the disk. The boot sector is used by many computer operating systems to determine how to access the diskette or drive. These viruses replace the critical boot sector program used to start the computer with their own malicious program often causing frequent computer crashes, allowing other malware infections, and performance issues.

A client attempted to install an upgrade to Kaspersky Anti-virus, but the install was interrupted and so the system was left in an unstable state. Continued use of the computer frequently resulted in the following Blue Screen of Death.

One of the side effects from this issue was that the hard drive was constantly getting corrupted and several drivers would fail to load. In order to get the system to boot we had to go into safe mode, run a check disk on reboot, and then the system would finally boot and run for a short period of time, which was all we needed.

The .NET Framework cleanup tool is designed to automatically perform a set of steps to remove selected versions of the .NET Framework from a computer.  It will remove files, directories, registry keys and values and Windows Installer product registration information for the .NET Framework.  The tool is intended primarily to return your system to a known (relatively clean) state in case you are encountering .NET Framework installation, uninstallation, repair or patching errors so that you can try to install again.

There are a couple of very important caveats that you should review before using this tool to remove any version of the .NET Framework from your system: