daren_r
07-01-2004, 09:52 AM
Well the computer guy got a mess on his own machine. Somehow spyware infiltrated my machine which I had not used for two days. I thought no big deal I will clean it and get rid of it. I do this everday. Well it appears I had some variant of VX2 which inserts files like IEhelper.dll and a few others. Read up on it is a mess. I could not get rid of it with any of the cleaners I had and I could not remove it manually. The program gives itself rights and removes your rights to remove files associated with it. Finally I found a plug in for adaware www.lavasoft.de that would remove it. Symptoms include doing a search and having a zesty search page come up. Having browser windows launch without you wanting them to. It is a stubborn SOB. It will stay dormant until you are doing heavy surfing or searching and then it will take over. I had the google toolbar which blocks pop ups and it got past that. I fist noticed somehting was up when I got new icons on my desktop that I did not place there. Then it got worse, any time I would do a google search another page would pop up with another search. This thing also tracks what you do and reports it back to another server. All of this without you ever knowing. Just thought I would share. If you run a spy ware cleaner and find something that VX2 that won't remove hit that lavasoft site and download the vx2 plug in for adaware.