Did that, zeroed it, then formatted using gparted. Now it doesn't appear: fdisk -l shows only the harddrive, no sdb1 Oh dear!

You probably didn't do it right, so here's what I do to clear the whole USB stick of anything:

That's it, then I mount /dev/sdb as usual and it works fine.

Maybe a loose wire in the usb, or it is just a cheap stick. Wobble it a bit, and try it in different ports, and it works.

BUT: stuck it in the library comp today, and the anti virus promptly said: same virus. And it had written an auto forget what .bat or inf to the stick.

Is it so: I insert the stick, the virus copies itself onto the stick. The anti virus then tells me there is a virus? In that case, how come the anti virus doesn't see it on the library comp?

Anyway, I'll follow your advice to the letter, kill the bugger again. As I said: undead viruses! I have a Zombie!

PS: should the stick be free of everything after treatment, or does the partition table use space? Bcause after zeroing then formatting, there was about 50Kb used. Or was that my friend the virus?

dd won't talk to me!
Doesn't it have an -v option to make it output something. It is taking forever! Think it has gone wrong!

kill -s INFO $5321; wait $5321

This didn't make it output anything either.

It's possible for the virus to do that and the antivirus could only be able to detect it on the USB stick.

How big is the USB stick ? It may take a while to zero the drive, you're basically writing zeroes to the whole drive. Technically you shouldn't do this too often as it will wear down the drive, but AFAIK there is nothing that can escape this zeroing. The virus would be wiped. If dd is slow, try using a different often larger 'bs=' option for dd. Like 'dd bs=1M if=whatever of=drive'.

It's a 2GB stick, cheap one, Kingston.

Did what you said last night. Worked apart from dd won't talk to me, and was taking so long, I thought it had hanged itself, so I killed the process. After this I re formatted as per your instructions. On remounting, there were 14Kb of the stick in use. Is that the partition table? Or leftover from dd being killed?

And: today, in the library, got it again. Must remember to use gmail!

You really should notify the library of the infection. The Conficker worm is a really bad thing, you only have to google a bit for the name to find a lot of info about it. And they are spreading it like Typhoid Mary. Normally the worm comes in through an unpatched security leak in Windows (unpatched by the administration, that is: MS issued a patch last October). It will keep Windows from patching, will keep the system from accessing antivirus vendors' sites and getting updates etc. It will also spread scareware. This worm already shut down the communication systems of the British Navy, the French Airforce, 3000 computer in Austrian hospitals and lots more, cleaning up after it often took weeks.

Once it is on a system it infects removable media like your stick by writing auto-executing information on it, which will then go on to infect any Windows computers the stick gets connected to. This infects even systems which already have the MS patch.

Robin