Did my PC get hit with a virus?

Unfortunately, I never use virus software(but I may start now). After doing the usual yesterday and powering down, I wake up this morning and when I boot up....I get VXD drivers are nowhere to be found. Windows 98 will not boot. Turns out my system registry was damaged or gone. So, I boot to Windows 98 setup and it repairs my system registry after finding some corrupt areas on my drive. At that point, rather than re-install Windows 98, I exited to see if this(ScanDisk correction) fixed my problem.

It booted a little farther into the process...even going as far to show my wallpaper....then it goes on to not know any of my hardware and detects it all over again. At this point, I know I'm freaking hosed. So, I just bypass all that crap and then the explorer.exe crashes with some rshswap.dll( or something) with a General Protection Fault.

So, I'm screwed. At that point, I salvage what files I can(of course I forgot some important files...none of it backed up doh) by booting to the C:\ prompt. After this, I format my drive all over again, reload Windows 98, reload all of my device drivers and software, set up my network connections again, and here I am.

It didn't take but maybe an hour and a half or so. I guess it's no big loss. But, I'm wondering what happened. Seems like a virus exploded my system by deleting alot of files. Hell, it could have been any virus. I doubt there was any way I could recover without a complete re-install. It must have been a scheduled virus as well.

I guess I learned my lesson...I may have to buy some virus software now. Any recommendations? Any free virus protection software around?

Surf

 

I forgot to mention that once I got past the VXD problem after ScanDisk corrected/reconstructed my system registry, I got everyone of the damn freaking .DLLs coming up....all the Windows DLLs. It said "cannot find DLL". I thought..oh I'll just put those back...yeah right. I knew then and there almost everything had to have been hosed. Leads me to believe my DLLs were wiped out. I should have checked as I could still get to the C:\ prompt and navigate.

Oh well...thanks for the virus software link.