System Challenges (specifics below)

[carljw]

Hi all - I am new here and using a Mac for about 4 years. The challenge is as follows:
- the system has been very slow and unresponsive lately
- I have had to hard boot a number of times in the past month
- I ran 3 different virus checkers, found and cleaned 3 Trojan infections
- I ran Onyx and performed repair permissions (there were 3 screens of repairs)
- a few things that keep occurring
a) iCal keeps providing alarms for meetings from 4 months ago even when deleting the meeting
b) I remove software from the Dock and they always come back if I do shutdown and restart
c) Some programs (eg MS Word) keep reloading the same file I haven't touched in 3 months
d) I use iBackup for business files as well as a Time Machine backup, recently iBackup gave me this Apple Script error
".../Application Support/iBackup//iBackup folder/Icon\r: Permission denied (1)"

- I was doing maintenance on the keychain, and found:
"Checked contents of ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
Label for item “6¬Ée}
@@Vò’®∏fi.
N~x” is not in UTF-8 encoding
Error: failed to update label attribute for “6¬Ée}
@@Vò’®∏fi.
N~x” (0x186AD)
Warning: some problems were not fixed
Repair failed"

I have a MacBook 13" (2008, version with no firewire) OS X 10.7.2, 4 Gb RAM, 2,4 GHz Core 2 Duo

Any help would be great.

thx

 

[Maverick513]

Back up the data you need, then reinstall the Mac OS X. It should solve all these problems.

 

[carljw]

Thx, that is what I was preparing to do.

 

[gnasher729]

- I ran 3 different virus checkers, found and cleaned 3 Trojan infections

Would be good to know whether it is the virus checkers telling you porkies, or whether you actually got a trojan. In which case, ask yourself how you got it, and DON'T DO THAT again.

b) I remove software from the Dock and they always come back if I do shutdown and restart
c) Some programs (eg MS Word) keep reloading the same file I haven't touched in 3 months

That's what shutdown does. It remembers what apps were open, and what documents, and when you restart it opens them again. Close the document, quit the application.

 

[GGJstudios]

Would be good to know whether it is the virus checkers telling you porkies, or whether you actually got a trojan.

.... and whether those trojans were Windows trojans, as it's rather rare to encounter a Mac trojan!

Macs are not immune to malware, but no true viruses exist in the wild that can run on Mac OS X, and there never have been any since it was released 10 years ago. The only malware in the wild that can affect Mac OS X is a handful of trojans, which can be easily avoided with some basic education, common sense and care in what software you install. Also, Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Lion have anti-malware protection built in, further reducing the need for 3rd party antivirus apps.

Mac Virus/Malware Info​

OP, for performance issues: Performance tips for Mac OS X

 

[carljw]

Thx again, I suspect these came from the Windows machine, I am now going through repairing disk permissions using DiskUtil. I do have Virtual Box installed and had similar problems when I had VMWare...we'll see!