What do you do with an infested machine?

I just looked at someone's computer who got a virus. Their internet was disabled and they had about 30 instances of unusual exes running.

I couldn't click anything.

What would you do in this situation? I brought HijackThis and ClamAV but I couldn't even get them started, and I didn't want to destroy their startup config. Is there any way but a reinstall to fix something like that?

Format and install Linux ^_________________^;;

Step away from the internet and sell computer ^_________^b

play with your little dick in front of his children

- try to boot into safe mode and see if you can get a sane configuration there.  get these programs on a floppy/CD before you proceed:

 ProcessExplorerNt (sysinternals.com)
 Autoruns (also sysinternals)
 BHODemon (google that)

 and see if you can get everything to a sane state.

it's probably better if you kill all the bad .exe's, save their config using migwiz.exe, reinstall and reload config.