something has made my laptop unusable!

[Ahab]

in my grand stupidity i was tricked into downloading active x.
unfortunately, this turned out to have trojan in it, but norton and windows defender apparently blocked it. Just to be safe i ran a virus scan and downloaded another anti spyware type thingy to check to be asfe, as my laptop is barnd new and im rather protective of it. Said new virus software program found 140 infections, as did norton, but only 14 infections. norton asked me to reset my pc to remove them all, and the newer program, however upon reseting my pc windows explorer keeps crashing, and restrting.
i have no system restore points however i have some very valuable files on my laptop hd that i do no want deleted if posibble. Im pretty sure i have a trojan, any advise would be great as this is kind of killing my birthday haha. Thanks!

[DogDragon]

Well you still can work online, you can go to
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
and do the online scan that's will be a good start.
and than go to the forum download page and get
HijackThis 1.99.1 and post the log in here and
people can help you more once they see the log
from HijackThis

[Thrax]

Please read this thread: http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64057&highlight=winantivirus

[Ahab]

unfortunatly house call did not find any threats.... which is a bit odd. i couldn't find that hijack thingy, may i have a link?
thanks again for your help, this is a really annoying problem

[DogDragon]

Go where Thrax said

[Trogan]

Ahab,

First, download HijackThis:

Click here (http://www.thespykiller.co.uk/files/HJTSetup.exe) to download HJTsetup.exe, and save it to your desktop.

Double click on the HJTsetup.exe icon on your desktop.
By default it will install to C:\Program Files\Hijack This.
Continue to click Next in the setup dialogue boxes until you get to the "Select Addition Tasks" dialogue.
Put a check by Create a desktop icon then click Next again.
Continue to follow the rest of the prompts from there.
At the final dialogue box click Finish and it will launch Hijack This.
Click on the "Do a system scan and save a log file" button. It will scan and then ask you to save the log.

DO NOT have HijackThis fix anything yet. Most of what it finds will be harmless or even required.

Second, go here (http://icrontic.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=57) and create a new thread. Then, post your HijackThis log in your thread.