Dear Molly... I mean LJ Genie...

[snugglekitty]

Okay. Moving on.

I have now run the free TrendMicro scan program on my desktop. I have also run SpyBot Search and Destroy.

TrendMicro found four infected files, which it deleted. Search and Destry found nothing.

I am still getting unexpected restarts and strange popups.

What should I try next?

Comments

[fortryll.livejournal.com]

ad-aware (I dont' have it on this computer so don't know what the company that wrote it is) is pretty good.

I'd also if at all possible put McAfee on your system, if you can either get a free trial or you can pay for a year's subscription. It now not only scans for viruses but also for spyware.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

*nod* Yup, I ran AdAware as well. Apparently it didn't find anything.

stabs in the dark

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... the choices for free virus scanning programs are limited. You could try Avast and/or Spyware, I think. If you're not running Windows XP or WinME, then maybe regclean wouldn't be a bad idea, but it's probably irrelevant.

If all of this does nothing, then probably either there's a virus that none of these things are detecting, or something has comandeered your browser. What browser are you using? If it's IE, try Firefox. Install it, reboot, do NOT open IE (or whatever), use Firefox for a while, and see if that works. If it does, your copy of IE (or whatever) is hosed.

Re: stabs in the dark

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

I downloaded a trial version of McAfee. So far it's found two more infected files.

I do use Firefox, and all of the popup ads I've gotten have the Explorer icon on them. Should I delete my copy of IE and get a new one? (Unfortunately some sites will only accept IE. Such as the McAfee site, for example.)

Re: stabs in the dark

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Ooo, trial version of McAfee! Hooray. That should be good. If it doesn't work, I'd personally try deleting IE, rebooting, and seeing if the problem persisted. You can then install a new copy. But if you're not even running IE at the time^* you're getting popups, that's probably not it.

* To see whether it's running, right-click on your taskbar, choose "Task Manager", and look to see if you have iexplore.exe running.

Re: stabs in the dark

[arachne8x.livejournal.com]

Be careful about doing this. I have heard horror stories of what happens when people get rid of IE because os the weird way it interacts with the OS.

Re: stabs in the dark

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

True -- under no circumstances would I recommend *leaving* it off!

Re: stabs in the dark

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

So, for that matter, you could skip the rebooting step and try the same process. *shrug*

Re: stabs in the dark

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Nope, not running ie when I'm getting the popups. I don't use IE anymore unless some site makes me.

Re: stabs in the dark

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

This sounds like there is an actual program running locally that is spawning copies of IE to show the ad. This really smells of Gator or some other ad generator. I'm wondering if there was some freeware loaded. A lot of the time Freeware also installs Gator or eqiv to generate revenue instead of charging for the sw. Some of the larger companies like Gator have paid off the adware/malware detector people to leave them off of the lists. I know that you have WeatherBug loaded it may be the one spawning the copies of IE.

Re: stabs in the dark

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

How would I test the theory?

Re: stabs in the dark

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

Start deleting everything that you don't need. You can see all of the programs that are registered in the control panel-add/remove programs area. These are only the valid ones but it's possible that the adblaster is bundled with a legitement program and it will go away when the main program is gone; Gator works like that since they have to play nice or people will start calling them bad names again. There are programs that can be run to list all of the autorun entries in the registry to see if there is something that shouldn't be there.

hmm

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

I didn't see anything that looked wrong, but I don't know what everything on the list is. (I wouldn't necessarily, even if it was all valid.) Maybe you can take a look later?

Or, if you can point me at one of the programs you mentioned, I could take a gander at that.