It's a minefield, innit?!

Do you have a set of 'System Restore' CDs that came with the PC? It's not that difficult to replace the hard drive and reinstate it 'as new'.

As for the apparently complicated terminology, it's not really so obscure, honest!

A 'caddy' is a box you can put a hard drive into, then you can plug it into your PC (after disabling 'autorun', of course!) and use it as if it's an internal drive.

PATA is the old IDE connection with the wide ribbon cable, SATA is the modern connection with a small (sometimes locking) plug.

ISO means an image file (cd_image.iso for example) that most CD burning software can use to make a CD - and is an easy way of producing a bootable CD.

As for disabling 'autorun', you only need to open 'My Computer'... right click on the drive icon, select 'properties' and you'll see an 'AutoPlay' tab.

Click that tab and you'll see a few options. All you do is click the 'radio button' on 'Select an action to perform', scroll down to 'Take no action', make sure it's highlighted and click 'apply'.

You DO NOT want to be propmted each time for an action, as this means the autorun.ini file will have already run...

However, if the choices are greyed out, you're too late - the malware has beaten you to it!

As yet I'm not sure about this shutting down business... I'll try to find out more, as it's a new one on me. Clearly it's the malware doing it, but why?! Okay, I know... 'because it can!'