A half hour later and, although no more viruses are found, four "suspect" programs -- all of them with the word "adware" in the title -- are discovered. I delete them all. Two of them were in a program folder from Lycos. Now, there may have been something useful from Lycos on my computer, but *I* didn't put it there. In fact, the little bastards were installed TODAY. Seeing as everything I care about was installed on the computer BEFORE today (either by Dell or by me) I figure these buggers can be safely deleted. (I also take a moment to consider whether it was really a good idea to not have a Firewall on freakin' April Fools Day.)
Can't delete them. They won't delete because they are running. I pull up Task Manager. I close them. I try to delete them. In the amount of time it has taken me to get back to the delete screen, they've started running again. I repeat this a lot.
In the meantime, I install a firewall. I move the unwanted programs to the desktop. I turn Jack off and on again, and as soon as he starts up, I delete the unwanted programs before they have a chance to engage. (Ha!)
I then open IE.
Instant barrage of adware again. More Trojans discovered and cleansed. Anti-Virus going nuts again, asking to rescan Jack AGAIN. This time I get a clue and -- before rescanning -- reset my home page, which has been changed from google to adware central.
Now, at least, I can access the internet. I completed this entry while doing the third virus scan, and Jack is apparently clean ... for now.
4 comments:
holy moley.. yes, he's definitely growing fast! boys! ~Liz(mmmm crunchy!)
like i said, keep your eye on him. he's been a handful ever since you met him.
Good for you for getting right on top of Jack (heh) with the Trojan thing.
I went through the most horrible 2 weeks of my life dealing with trojans and virii. Learned more about the innerds of my computer than I ever wanted to. As a result, I now have 2 virus/adware scanners (Ad-aware and Spybot) that I run on almost a weekly basis, and run Mozilla browser. I still have trojans that are quarantined and can't be deleted but at least (Norton tells me) they can't create problems.
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