ARGH! Something's infested my computer!

[fuzzyoctopus]

So I really don't know what to do.  I've never had problems with this before.  

When I left the house yesterday about 4, I had one IE window open, and I believe it was on my Yahoo inbox.  When I got back at 6:30, I had twelve windows open, and three things had downloaded THEMSELVES onto my computer.

I am royally pissed.    So the first thing I do is shut down IE.  The second thing I do is uninstall the three programs, once I find them.  Then I run AdAware and get to remove 120 items.  Fun times!

But I've still missed something, because I'm still getting crap from IE, the settings on my browser are seriously screwed up, and I'll get pop ups every hour or so.

So J.T. goes through my registry files and deletes a lot of crap that shouldn't be there.   Still didn't fix it.  Gah.

Other than never using IE again, and sticking soley to Opera, (which I'm tempted to do, because IE is a piece of crap), what can I do?

Help?

[Spriggan]

Have J.T. go through your regestry again and look through those files he deleated.  Sometimes the programs reinstall themselfs into the regestery if you delete them.  If that's happening just google the name of the file and you should easly beable to find a free program to fix your problem.

And I'm not even going to go into whats wrong with your statment about only useing Oprea.

[fuzzyoctopus]

Opera doesn't pull this kind of excrement on me.  
Opera has pop-up blocker built in.  
Opera doesn't shut down if you open more than 6 windows.


And thank you for the very helpful info.  I'll try that.

[Spriggan]

And I'm not even going to go into whats wrong with your statment about only useing Oprea.

What part of the above statment don't you understand?

And your welcome.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I hate spyware, those b'stards. Mind you thats a nice thing about mac... the stuff can try to install itself... but right now it cant work.

[Onion of Death]

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=mirrors

Download the program there. It's very useful, and easy to use. It's a spyware and adware destroying program.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Im wary of those programs as well, many of them were created by the same people who made the other malware and in many cases they bring their own spyware to the table.

[fuzzyoctopus]

Ditto.  For example, one of the programs that downloaded itself is a thing called Purity Scan.  It's supposed to find hidden porn on your computer.  Ooo!  But it also gives you regular popup ads too.  I didn;t want any of it- but sprig was right and I found a thing that removes it.

[Onion of Death]

I've used this one for about a year and I haven't had any trouble with it.

[fuzzyoctopus]

I'll give it a go after we clean out the registry a bit, if I'm still having problems.  Thanks.

[JP Dogberry]

I havn't used Opera mysef, but I use Mozilla, and if Opera isn't IE, it has to be good.

There's one other thing you can try with a browser switch that often helps (Helps you that is, not the computer):

Leave an IE icon on the desktop, and rename it "Piece of **** 4.0" (That's what I did)

[Entsuropi]

That link he gave is one to follow. I can vouch for the program myself. So can SE.

And i use IE. I liked it more with the Avant upgrade. Added stuff like tabs, popup blockers etc. Plus its still IE - other browsers tend to have compatibility issues with some websites.

Your choice though

[fuzzyoctopus]

Well things seem to be better.

We found that among the spyware I'd also gotten a virus, which is always fun.  the Peper virus, which I'd never heard of.

*shrug*

And I do like having two browsers.  What doesn't work in one invariably works in the other.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

well also make sure you have the latest windows updates, since it sounds like you could have had some hole that got exploited, like the RPC hole that blaster went through.

but yeah...I'm happy on my mac too...

My friend has some piece of malware on his computer that isn't known about by any of the adaware type things he tries. It is a little annoying but benign in his case; it has no adverse effect on anything he does. It's some sort of thing where if he goes to a website with a form that has a field named "URL" it will stick some sort of picked-from-a-list url into that field whenever the form gets submitted. Specifically when he's uploading torrents to scarywater, these urls show up on the page where you can edit the page the visitors see...but since the URL field only becomes active for torrents not hosted on scarywater, and all the ones he uploads are hosted on it, the page viewers never see these spurious links at all, so they do nothing except add a bit of clutter to the page only staff can see.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

uhm... I've actually not heard of that program before, so I cannot/will not, in fact, be vouching for it.

It has, in fact, been my experience that OS utilities other than a simple firewall or virus checker are for the most part extremely damaging to your system. Ad Aware is different, and I've seen some popup blockers that are pretty good though, but anythig scan as you guy sets off alarm bells in my head.

One thing about installing, NEVER EVER check teh "always trust content from..." no matter what the company listed is. if this window never pops up, change your IE settings to make it ask.

Safe computing practice will protect you from problems like this. You don't have to change from IE or to a Mac to do it.

Oh, and IE is just fine. I wonder about the complaints I hear about it. "More than 6 windows" is ridiculous. I have an old computer (300 mmx, I think) running WinXP, and on top of all my other programs, i often have as many as 2 dozen browser windows open or more. And it never hurts my performance.