A few annoying things have been happening lately every time I use IE. First of all, no matter how many times I adjust the homepage’s url, that thing always takes me to some lousy search engine, mysearchnow or whatever. Also, an extra toolbar keeps appearing every time I open a new browser window, with a built-in search engine and a few completely stupid buttons that change every time I search for something.
On top of that, every time this thing fails to connect to a server, instead of the standard white page, I get rerouted to a site called PerfectNav. I’m getting really sick of this. I’ve tried deleting the temporary internet files, deleting the cookies, and I even checked the control panel to see if those things were the result of some sneaky installation, but I didn’t find anything suspicuous.
Now, what I wanted to know is how the heck I can get rid of all that stuff, because it’s beginning to get on my nerves.
That happened to me before.:too bad;
Ahhh gotta love spyware. I’ve been using Slimbrowser…
Anyway, it seems that some advertising program stealth-installed on your comp.
I highly suggest you get AdAware and Spybot S&D. Those should help clear out your problems. Remember to clean out the temp files and cookies ans so on to make sure everything’s back to normal.
Indeed it is.
That sounds like a classic description of a spyware infestation. Try running Adaware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/), that should take care of your problem if you run it once or twice. If you still have trouble post back here and we’ll see what we can do.
There’s a homepage hijacker that automatically opens your CD-rom everytime you open Internet Explorer. It’s really annoying.
The good news are the program worked and found loads of sneaky crap. The bad news are, the hijacking is still here, along with the rest. Every time I perform a new scan, more stuff turns up. Adaware did a good job, but maybe I need a bigger gun.
You’re not going to get a larger gun unless you do it by hand, there’s a limit to what adaware can take care of.
Here’s what you can do to delete most of them by hand:
- Hit control-alt-delete to bring up the task manager (assuming you’re on XP or 2k).
- Kill Every process that has your User Name as the user name (don’t touch SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE, NETWORK SERVICE) except for EXPLORER.EXE. N.B. It will also close this window so finish reading my post before you do that.
- Close Task Manager.
- Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs.
- Assuming that you have at least some idea of the programs you installed on your PC, uninstall everything you don’t recognize.
- Close Add/Remove Programs.
- Run Adaware again, this should get most of the spyware left on your system.
- Reboot into safe mode, (during the boot-up process keep hitting F8 after the system detects your hard drives until you see a menu, pick safe mode.)
- Safe mode will prevent any .dll that the spyware might have installed from launching which will let you kill programs that might have read as being in use.
- Run Adaware one last time, this will hopefully get rid of the last of the spyware.
At this point you should have managed to get rid of about 99.5% of all spyware, anything that survives this will be impossible to get rid of without messing in the registry and system configuration and that’s something I won’t tell you how to do over the web, it’s too easy to mess up.
Hope this helps.
This doesn’t look good. Every time I reboot to allow the two programs to flush the startup-activated crap, I find out that it shows up again.
Then do what Dark Sand says. End Task pretty much everything and <i>then</i> run Ad-aware + Spybot.
I think I got it right this time. I should have remembered to turn the connection off before running those things. I also took the chance to make a full system scan. Just finished rebooting, and I think this thing is clean now. The hijack and that annoying toolbar are gone, and so it looks like they won’t bug me anymore.
Well guys, thanks for the advice. Needless to say, I’m going to include Spybot and Adaware on the list of programs to run when performing maintenance, along with defrag and the antivirus.
Maybe all that crap had something to do with IE’s strange and unexpected crashes and with a few hassles I had to put up with during navigation.
To prevent future happenings like this go to the IE menu Tools -> Advanced -> uncheck Enable Install On Demand, and also use the Immunize option that comes with Spybot.
Yes, I’ve already used the Immunize option two or three times. As for that adjustment you mentioned, I’ll see to it soon. I certainly don’t want to have all that stuff piling up in here again.
How often should I run more full system checks?
Originally posted by Dark Sand
That sounds like a classic description of a spyware infestation. Try running Adaware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/), that should take care of your problem if you run it once or twice. If you still have trouble post back here and we’ll see what we can do.
I just downloaded that.
…
I can’t believe how much shit I had on my computer…
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/
If you ever find anything you Adaware and Spybot S&D can’t remove, manual removal instructions can be found here of the most common spyware…
Spyware is mean, which is why you don’t visit webpages you don’t know with IE.