There I was feeling satisfied for having washed the Dong Fong, changed the fish tank's water and bathed Lily and wanted to start on the Visual Basic project. However, the Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition trial was over and I had to fill up a form to register it. My smartness ended up getting the better of me and I went to download a crack from what seemed like a good website.

Upon running it my AVG anti-virus had an alert and instantly I knew something was wrong, I did another virus scan and it found a few trojans.. Feeling unsafe and using my smartness (the proper way this time), I continued on to perform online scans using BitDefender and Kaspersky, two of the best and most reputable anti-virus around. The scanning wasn't over yet, I also installed TrojanHunter and SpyBot to further clean the system and removed them after.

The rest of the afternoon was spent scanning and scanning while I played Dota on my laptop. I did think of using System Restore in the middle and I had seen its effectiveness before, but decided against it (again showing my stubbornness) and stuck with scans instead.

What started as a good intention to start on a project made me waste a whole day instead, hopefully the issue has been resolved. Here I am back at square one with Visual Studio running succesfully after registering it, something which I should have done in the first place.