Wow. I was embarassingly had by this one yesterday. 2 full years of virus free computing in my home office. I’m still not sure what happened but it was most likely from a site I was browsing.

Basically, the stuff on castlecops, and other sites with steps to rid yourself of this virus DO NOT WORK. You can only fully rid yourself by doing a complete re-imaging.

Here are the symptoms:

you get popups almost immediately after you close them. They look JUST like the windows security center. Also, your “folder options” menu is removed, via a registry setting. Your browser is hijacked so that when you click on a google search result (to try to fix the issue) you are redirected to a “buy this anit-spyware” site.
It also causes admin users to see a “registry editing is disabled by your administrator” message, even when you are an admin user.

It kills google chrome completely. Horrible.

do youself a favor, and save hours in troubleshooting time, and just re-image.