After removing it and rebooting, the infection appeared to be gone, but IE wouldn’t display any web pages, although the internet would connect and there was data traffic. The reason it wouldn’t display any web pages was that the browser connection settings had been modified to point to a proxy server at 127.0.0.1, which I believe means that a web server had been installed on the computer and was intended to act as a proxy for all web pages, possibly scanning them for important information such as userid’s and passwords and then sending that information to a remote recipient. I don’t know if the web server was installed to a different location from the Personal Defender EXE; it is possible that it was, because I could see traffic even though there were no programs that I knew of that were using the web, even in the background. Possibly the configuration was faulty and the web server didn’t function properly, and this is why I noticed it. I believe that IF it functioned correctly, then I would have believed the infection was gone, while a very insidious part of it remained, silently siphoning off userid’s and passwords for websites.

After you have cleaned up the infection, be sure to check your browser’s connection settings and verify that it does not point to a proxy server at 127.0.0.1, using port 5555. I could disable this usage of the proxy server, but I couldn’t convince myself that there still wasn’t a rouge web server installed somewhere on the PC functioning and active, as I could see a lot of network traffic when there should have been none.

To clear up this part of the infection I used a system restore point to two days prior.

Good luck with particularly nasty infection.