Getting Tata Indicom Photon Plus to work

My Plug 2 surf modem breathed its last on Thursday. I wasnt that sad, coz, I'd been waiting for a reason to upgrade to the Photon plus USB modem. hehe... So I got all the information needed from the Tata Indicom store the very next day. There were lot of documents required and hence had to wait till Monday.  

So, on Monday I get the modem for 3.5k and they said, a rep would come over to my place and activate the connection within 24 hours.

A rep calls me up on Tuesday morning and comes over just after noon. I'd already installed the s/w from the device and he just had to activate it. Now, heres where the problems start. For some reason, the device just wouldn connect to the activation server. After a couple of reinstalls, changing ports, this guy confirms that the activation server is down and asks me to check after a couple of hours. The error that appeared was the destination server was busy and was not responding (Error 618 and Error720).

So, I call this guy after 3 hours and he confirms that the server is still down and informs me that he will come over in the evening and manually activate the device (hmm.. why couldnt he do this earlier). He comes over with a USB device and installs the s/w from there. Along with the s/w came a virus named "KHATRA". The first virus on my system in 3 years :-( . I killed the virus processes and tried to run the Photon plus connection. But it was still giving error 720 (unable to connect/authentication failed). I asked the rep to leave and told him that I'd try to figure out what went wrong.

-- Virus Removal --

KHATRA is a trojan virus that keeps creating folders and running processes. It gets added to the registry and hence starts up with Windows. After doing quite a bit of research on google, I decided to manually remove the virus. I'd to search for KHATRA.exe, Xplorer.exe and gHost.exe and delete them from the system. Once this was done, the registry needed to be cleaned up with these entries.

The problem with clearing the registry was that, the virus had blocked access to the registry and some other admin services (even the Control Panel links were missing). I had to enable the registry by making changes as per this link:

http://www.troublefixers.com/registry-editing-has-been-disabled-by-your-administrator

After accessing the registry, I manually removed all references of the virus. In the process, I deleted some of the start up programs that were now being pointed to the virus. 

I then installed MBAM and found more folders where the virus was installed. Once this was done, I reinstalled AVG and now the system was almost cleaned up. My Internet Explorer (8) go t infected and now appears as Internet Exploiter (still working to get this back to normal).

-- Resolving error 720 for USB broadband modems --

To resolve this error, you have to reset all network configurations. This can be done by running the following exe :  

http://forums.practicallynetworked.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=131

(The person who wrote this little program is a hero!)
 
It removes all your network drivers, reboots your machine, reinstalls the drivers and then does a second reboot.. Once this was done, I was able to connect to the internet. I must say, that the connection speeds are quite impressive. After nine hours of research/system restarts, finally everything worked :-) .

PS: The tata indicom rep didnt pick my call this mrning.. maybe he thought I was still unable to connect or wanted to complain abt the virus... :-)