Ah, what a perfect morning. Crispy matzoh for breakfast, a cup of delicious coffee, and then a couple of hours trying to clean my PC of adware and spyware, some of it fiendishly clever and as tough to pry out as a hermit crab that’s grown into its shell.

Adaware works pretty well – extremely well since it’s free – but there are some objects that it can’t delete because they are in use. And neither can I, even doing a safe mode start-up. Die 3avxfmcodec.cpy.dll, die!

Some of the little wankers get loaded via my Hosts file, and then reload themselves after I manually delete them. WinPatrol – also free – has been doing a good job of monitoring the various soft startup bellies of XP, notifying me when a program is trying to add itself to auto-start, hijacking my home page or is juist hanging around the schoolyard asking kids leading questions. Their persistence is almost admirable.

Get a Mac? And miss the thrill of editing the Registry? Not on your life!

Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz’s comment, I got a copy of SpyBot. It’s good, but not good enough to get rid of two of the vermin on my system: Something continued to overwrite my HOSTS file, putting in redirects, and something was causing IE to spin up an unwanted page. Even running it while in Safe mode didn’t work.

I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve got it licked. I saved a fixed version of the HOSTS file and locked it against alteration, and I hand edited the Registry, especially some of the funky entries in HKey_USERS/S-1-5-21…etc/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer. (The middle set of numerals is too long to write out.) Check entries like SearchUrl and Toolbar. And good luck to you.

PS: Remember to set a savepoint and to save your Registry before mucking about with it.

Categories: Uncategorized dw