READ THE QUESTION BEFORE YOU ANSWER.....a buddy of mine has a piece of malware on his ocmputer and it will?

restart his computer. He has Avast and ZoneAlarm and neither has had any problem unfortunately he was infected before getting those, and was using AVG when he was infected. What Trojan/Virus/Worm is this? if you give a whole bunch of antivirus names i will delete your answer.....unless you know that the antivirus will specifically remove the infection

oh sorry i forgot it was called Renos-AM in Avast.

It is impossible to determine the exact form of malware he contracted without more specific details. Furthermore some malware install with the sole purpose of allowing other forms of malware to either piggyback in or it disables security settings thus allowing other malicious programs to attack.

In addition, AVAST, which is an antivirus product, is not the same as using a legitimate antispyware tool. If your friend hasn't any antispyware products installed, he should look at downloading, checking for updates, reboot into Safe Mode, and then running the antispyware and AVAST. Here are some free antispyware products to consider.

SuperAntispyware
http://superantispyware.com/
Spybot S&D (free version requires manual updating)
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/downl...
AVG AntiSpyware
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/20/lng/us/tp...
Adaware from Lavasoft (free version requires automatic updating)
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_a...

To get into Safe Mode, reboot and then either hold down or tap the F8 key repeatedly while the computer is starting up.

The reason to use a legitimate antispyware product alongside your antivirus regularly is that both detect different forms of malware and use different techniques to target them.

After cleaning out the bugs, disable System Restore (some malware will hide in the System Volume Information files as backups) while still in Safe Mode.

Reboot to return to normal mode and re-enable System Restore when he logs back in.
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Edit to respond to additional details.

According to Sophos, it is a trojan. However Avast classifies it as adware so that's why Avast may not be removing it and why AVG let it slip in.

If you friend follows the above steps, especially running an antispyware application such as Superantispyware, he should be able to clean it up with no problem.

As stated earlier, although there is some overlap between antivirus and antispyware, both can use different methods in identifying and removing malware.

Best of luck to you and your friend.

Delete my answer all you want, I don't mind. Malware is generally associated with a program he allowed to be downloaded. The only way to get rid of it is to delete the program. Most anti-virus software will overlook this because of program association. Find what download had the malware attached and un-install it then run the anti virus program.

I'm not going to give you a long list of anti-virus names, but feel free to delete this anyway.

You need to tell us the name of the malware that's been identified, then someone can tell you which program is most likely to remove it. Otherwise it's guesswork. If you don't have the name then you don't have the right kind of program. It might seem like Catch 22 but that's the way it works, my friend.