Re: just blowing off a little steamabout xp

On Wednesday 22 June 2005 12:05 am, Jim Gribbin wrote:
> I had to do something on my sisters computer running xp-home, sucker
> had so much spyware/adware on it it was hard to use.
> Damn thing has Norton Anti-Virus (updated) and whatever that adware
> program billy supplies. 445 pieces of adware/spyware on it. Only
> about 12 different ones, but so many multiple instances that it
> totaled 445.
>
> Spybot took care of most of them, but there was one called WinTools.
> I probably spent 30 min. researching it with Google. Then rebooting
> in Safe Mode, un-registering dll's, rebooting, attempting to delete
> files, rebooting into Safe-Mode to re-un-register because either they
> left one .dll out of the documentation or the spyware had another
> .dll that the hadn't mentioned and all had re-registered themselves,
> finally removing files, about an hour of finding and removing keys
> from the registry, then finally re-running Spybot to clean up. All
> kinds of fun.
>
> Total time spent: about 4 1/2 to 5 hours. 2+ on the last one alone.
>
> What I really loved about the last one was that according to the
> documentation on its removal, it was originally installed by ActiveX
> (for an ENHANCED Internet experience - horse hockey)

A great way to deal with windows is to use an image of a clean install,
save data to a different partition..which means changing paths so they
don't point to the 'My Documents" folder..which is another point of
attack. Re-imaging an install (NT4)used to take me about 12 minutes.
The problem is, it is to much to ask of a casual user.

-- 
Greg Madden
Precision Air Balance, Inc.
Phone: 907-276-0461
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