so, i'm going to get back to doing surgery on my laptop.

what do i do?

i don't want to open it up.

there's a large number of system files that i basically just want to delete, in order to wipe out the backdoor, but i'm going to need to try a few things, slowly, first.

i was doing well this morning in clearing it out, but i made a mistake in shutting down an svchost to clear out some authentication software. it didn't recover, and i'll have to reimage.

that may have been overkill. but, i'm going to see what happens when i try to boot with the file deleted.

we're going to do this on the pc, where concerns about backdoors are minimal.

i'd rather be doing something else, but, as we can see, i'm dealing with an escalation, here.

i may take the hard drive with me next time i go shopping.