Normally advanced computer user that are very familiar with Windows don’t need an antivirus program to keep their computer away from virus. Even if their computer got infected by virus, they are able to pin point where the virus is and manually remove it. You see, a virus somehow needs to auto run when Windows is booted up and frankly speaking there are quite a lot of launch points and memorizing each ones will turn you into a big time geek. So we rely on utilities that can do that and thankfully there are quite a lot of free tools that can analyze programs that startup with Windows. Here is another one called Silent Runners which I find quite interesting because it is written in VBScript. Do take note that this tool is only for the experienced because there is no nice graphical user interface. Analyzing autoruns is already a tough job to some and having no GUI at all makes it even harder.
The purpose of Silent Runners is to identify the programs that start up with Windows. Silent Runners is not an anti-virus, an anti-trojan, or a spyware scanner. It only pinpoints how programs start up and it does not scan the system to identify every trace of malware. The text file it creates can be removed for study or stored as a benchmark.
The output file summarizes everything the script thinks you should know. It will report any non-default value it finds anywhere it looks. A default value is something that’s put there by Microsoft when Windows is installed. For instance, in every Windows installation, the default shell is explorer.exe. If the script finds explorer.exe listed as the shell, it won’t add that to the output file.
However, it doesn’t mean that everything in the output file is suspicious. The script which is based on its limited code couldn’t figure out if certain things were suspicious or not, so it put it in the output file so you could go figure it out. Under some circumstances, the script will alert about suspicious data. It will do this by prefacing the entry in the output file with the symbols ! or H and an explanatory note will be placed in the report footer. Still this does not mean that the PC is infected but you should take a closer a look at that line.
There are virus that are coded in vbscript and one example is the Solow worm. Your antivirus program should notify you that a malicious script is trying to run when you double click on the “Silent Runners.vbs” file. Just make sure you allow or authorize it to run or else it won’t work.
Silent Runners is free, portable and it runs under Windows 95, Windows 98 (Standard Edition and Second Edition), Windows Me (Millennium Edition), Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home/Professional, Windows Vista and 7.