O/T Registry

[Owen Drumm]

This is off topic I know but some bugger has infected my pc and hijacked my homepage. Done a sweep and cleaned everything but it's still showing. Does anyone know which file in the registry controls the homepage so I can boot the sucker out?

[Jan]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by homepage, but if it is your internet home page then it is in

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-902472267-506583582-145416480-1007\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\StartPage,

Cheers,

[Owen Drumm]

That's what I mean. Cheers Jan

[NormanRouxel]

Also try Internet Expolrer / Tools / General and you can set it there. If you find it being changed back to an undesired value then you still have some viral / spyware on your system.

Norman

[TheBoyLard]

Owen,

it sounds like you have a bit of spy/adware installed. I'm not going to teach you to suck eggs but if you use any of the common 'free' programmes like:
Time or Date Manager,
Gator or GAIN,
Kazaa (KazaaLite is ok) or other common p2p apps (Morpheus, Imesh etc) then you most likely have some spyware installed.
If anyone actually bothered to read the ts&cs for these and many other progs you'd notice that you also 'benefit'(!) from some additional software that would improve your browsing experience or some such waffle.
As a minimum, they will collect details and 'phone home' whilst you are online. These details could just be sharing cookie data with other sites (which goes against what cookies are supposed to do) thus enabling a browsing profile to be built.
They, more than likely, will also collect email addressess, IP addresses and maybe even more data.
Just check your system (every pc I have ever built/supplied/repaired over the past 18mts has this) with Adaware.
Anyone who regualrly installs software d/l from the web, or browses anywhere off the ''mainstream' sites, this is essential.

Btw, it's free of course!! Recommended by Steve Gibson of GRC.
A fantastic resource for the honest truth about a lot of net myths, but also a real insight into DoS and DDoS attacks - set aside a good couple of hours for this alone!!

Cheers and be safe!

Andy.

ps. If you want any further info on free tools that really work, let me know.

[Owen Drumm]

I have actually scanned my system with adaware and it was amazing how muck junk was on there. The problem occurred when my 13 year old son got onto my pc and downloaded Kazaa amongst outher stuff.

After scanning with Adaware and Spybot it still hasn't solved the problem.

I am on Win98 on my home pc and went into the registry to delete loads of references to the url concerned including IE startpage but still doesn't work. I have got two seperate users on my pc, me (admin) and my son. I logged on under both usernames to check the registry but still to no avail.

Any other ideas?