Anti-virus problems - This time close to home

My wife’s computer (possibly my fault) was attacked by a new virus and boy was it a pain to resolve. I haven’t had a real virus for sometime for myself or my clients but this one reminded me of why you must be diligent in keeping your system up to date.It turns out my wife’s computer was attacked by the TDSS Trojan. The way I determined something was wrong was that every time I did a Google search and clicked on a search result it opened another browser and was directing my to some go.google.com/…. address which was never what I was looking for anyway. I then found that my AVG install was not operating correctly - The scan actually fails with an error I can’t remember. To make matters worse I found that I could not run many of the utilities to resolve these issues like Hijackthis.exe. The programs would run and show in the task manager but nothing on the screen. This would even occur in the Safe Mode.SolutionThe final solution was to use the Ultimate Boot CD  to boot the computer, go to the windows\system32 directory and remove a bunch of recent files starting with TDSS and then repeat in the windows\system32\drivers directory.Once I did this I was able to reboot the computer. Update the AVG and PC Doctor and run scans which cleaned up the rest of the problem. I have left out a bunch of details since finding this solution took several hours of work to get to a point where this was the actual issue.I thought this might help someone else with a similar problem and not create a whole wasted evening making a computer work.