HELP! was googling and a virus and trojan message came up

[Margaret in Burton]

Suddenly said I have hundreds of viruses and trojans and worms.

I am on OH's PC at the moment.

I XP and am running IE8

I am in the process of running McAfee, ADAware and Malwarebytes.

I think I have found the file it was trying to download, it's a massive thing and I cancelled download.

It's called ntuser and it's a dat file. Showing has having downloaded 4,864kb

So far AdAware has picked up 45 infections but it is still scanning.

[KiteRunner]

Usually when those messages come up saying you have hundreds of viruses etc you should just ignore the message as it is a scam trying to get you to download some malware. Searching for info about ntuser.dat it seems to be a registry file that you need to have, so I'm a bit confused about that. But if you're running anti-virus software that you already had on the computer to check then that should pick up any nasties, hopefully.

[Margaret in Burton]

That was my first thought Kate.

McAfee hasn't found anything so far, still scanning and has done 77%. The Adaware could be finding things because I haven't used it for ages.
Malwarebytes has found nothing as yet either.

If these are all clear would it be the best thing to shut down and restart?

[KiteRunner]

Sounds like a good idea, Margaret.

[Margaret in Burton]

Well I'm back on my own computer, so far so good. McAfee nor anything else found anything worrying.