After getting said laptop from Dad and fixing, couple of things to note.
1. “System Tool” infection is wicked, but fixable: best fix here
2. Try try try to remove access to IE. But you can’t completely. But you can do this. Create an htm file somewhere on the C drive, and edit to say something in size 20 font like “Dad, don’t use IE, use Google Chrome” and link to Google Chrome path on the machine. Set it as the homepage (file://c:blah.htm)
I blogged earlier about VMWare and Lost Ethernet connections as Emily has her pc running as VM on my dev machine at home. Well recently another weird thing happened. All USB devices dissapeared. Not sure why or what happened, but I had to edit the .vmx file directly in notepad and set the option
usb.present = “TRUE”
it was set to FALSE, but neither of us changed it, somehow VMWare lost the ability to know it could process usb devices for this VM. Odd, but resolved.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 