I have a windows xp os. Today when I started my machine and after my os loaded (after logging in and all) the system was very slow. I restarted the machine manually, went into safemode, and opened msconfig dialog box. I saw some thing startup items. It was named "u", and the exe it referred to was wnm.exe. I did a search for it, but did not find anything relevant. Anyone know what it could be?

How do people find out if this is a virus or not, if you are put up to the task?

If you have access to the file, you can upload it to Jotti at https://virusscan.jotti.org/ on the web or to Virus Total at https://www.virustotal.com/ on the web. Either service will let you upload a file for a free scan againist multiple antivirus programs (including Clam). If more than a couple of them find a file is bad (infected), it probably is, so you should delete it from your machine.

Another alternative is to download and install the free Memory Scanner program from Threat Expert at https://www.threatexpert.com/default.aspx on the web (go to Tools, Memory Scanner). It's a neat program that scans your memory for stealthy virues whenever you want, and it comes with an applet that lets you do a quick upload of a file to Threat Expert (actually PC Tools/Threatfire, I believe). About 5 minutes later you receive a written email analysis of the file. All this is done from the Threat Expert GUI after you set it up. This only works with Windows PE files--nothing else like PDF, HTML, etc. but I use it a lot. It doesn't remove anything--it just warns you.

Regards,