DescentBB

I have been doing a lot of cleaning on my laptop recently, and I've found that I have no way to remove the adware on my hard drive. Superbar is an exceptionally hard one to kill. Norton 2004 Pro cannot remove these files, and I cannot find them in my ad/remove programs list. I can't even delete them, they are protected somehow. AdAware can't get rid of them either, granted it's only the shareware version.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? Please leave all flames for another post, I am not as computer savvy as most of this BB is.

Why are you using Adaware in the first place ( it doesn't remove jack just squirls it away )?

Spybot Search and Destroy is your friend


Update (select mirror server) go on!

Bulletproof Software has an effective spyware/adware cleaner too.

will working in safemode help "unprotect" the files?

Fdisk!

I use Spybot and Adaware together.

At some site, there was a review where they installed a bunch of known spyware crap and pitted Adaware vs. S&D on VMware Virtual Machine and saved the image. They tested Adaware and S&D, and, basically, Adaware slightly outperformed S&D, but they both caught a lot that the other missed. So the moral of the story is to use both.

If safe mode doesn't help, there's always the good ol' recovery console, but I'm guessing that the reason you can't delete them from Windows is that they're simply running.

Also, removing the offending spyware won't do you any good if you leave the service running. Go into your task manager and check for anything out of the ordinary BEFORE running any spyware killing program. Download a copy of Startup.exe and check to see if anything out of the ordinary loads there as well. (that checks both your startup folder and your registry at the same time) Also, STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. IE is nothing more than a security risk. The only reason it still remains on my system is because its required to run Windows Update, and thats the only time I willingly load it. You've got a wide array of alternative browsers out there that are a hell of alot more secure than IE (such as Mozilla, FireFox, Opera, etc...), and offer alot more features/functionality. (and unlike IE, understand only standard compliant coding, which promotes proper HTML coding.)

Lastly, I agree with Jeff. You can bicker about the pros and cons of Adaware vs. Spybot S&D, but it pays to run both. It really does.

IE is no more of a security risk than the person using it.

There's nothing wrong with using IE as long as you don't run it under anything more than guest or limited user access. With XP's fast user switching, you can log in with a guest account to browse the web, and then switch to an admin account to do local things that require it.

I tried using Mozilla, and it was so painfully slow that I went back to IE. My cable internet is blazing, but Mozilla turned it back into 56k type speeds, I couldn't deal with that.

I also tried using S&D last night, and it locked up completely, it's not supposed to do that is it?

Nexus_One wrote:I tried using Mozilla, and it was so painfully slow that I went back to IE. My cable internet is blazing, but Mozilla turned it back into 56k type speeds, I couldn't deal with that.

You need to read this thread

I also tried using S&D last night, and it locked up completely, it's not supposed to do that is it?

Umm....no. Did you check for offending stuff running in the background before you ran Spybot? I suggest you check out spywareinfo.com and get a copy of Hijackthis! and see if it picks up anything nasty.

I tried what you posted, MD, and it didn't do anything special. I hope FireFox loads faster than Firebird, 'cause IE loads in a 1/2 second, where Firebird takes 5-10sec (2ghz) initially, and 3-5sec any other time.

I'v eheard Firefox chomps the left one, anyone remember why such a statement would be made?

Why can't I update the latest definitions for Spybot S&D? When I search for updates, it finds them. But when I try to DL, it freezes the app.