Argh! How do I get rid of "Second Thought" adware/malware?

I should have known better. I’m in a LiveJournal community where members share episodes of a TV show, and they do it by posting it to a site called YouSendIt, where you can post big files and folks can download them. For the first time last night I downloaded one, and it came with a “prize.”

When I opened Windows Media Player, up popped an installation screen for a program called “Second Thought.” I dismissed the screen but apparently this didn’t matter, because the software was installed on my machine. I did a little research on it and tried Spybot, but that didn’t work so I downloaded a spyware program called “Spyware Nuker” and ran a deep scan on my machine. It detected Second Thought (along with several others) and, following a reboot, ran the scan again and said that it found no spyware on my machine.

I tested it by pulling up Windows Media Player again (on a different file–I had already deleted the TV show file) and didn’t get anything strange. Phew, I said to myself, that takes care of that.

However, later on today I tried to listen to a song snippet from Amazon and there was that damned installation screen again! :mad: I’m running the Nuker scan again right now and it’s finding all kinds of things that weren’t there this morning. I’m sure it’s this “Second Thought” thing’s fault (well, that and normal cookies, which I don’t mind).

So…does anybody know what I can do to permanently delete this piece of garbage from my machine? I’d hate not to be able to use Windows Media Player anymore. Once Nuker gets rid of it again, should I reinstall WinMedia? Or is there something else I need to do? This is really annoying me.

Thanks in advance.

Believe it or not…they actually have an Uninstaller listed on their page. May be worth a shot?

Check this out: link. It sounds like a bad one.

I spent the entire day today wiping out a spyware infection. I’m careful; I don’t open unknown attachments, I use firewalls, I always install Windows updates, I virus check and spyware scan regularly… and still I got infected. I ran three different spyware scanners and still had it. Finally I had to follow the instructions here, which involved running three different anti-virus programs and about 6 different spyware scanners. I have some 300,000 files, so it took forever (and each one caught something different), but it seems to have worked… knock on wood.

Thanks for turning me on to YouSendIt—I’ll definitely be making use of their service. :slight_smile:

Bazooka Spyware Scanner’s instructions for manual removal of 2ndthought:

  1. Start the registry editor. This is done by clicking Start then Run. (The Run dialog will appear.) Type regedit and click OK. (The registry editor will open.)
  2. Browse to the key:
    ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Run’
  3. In the right pane, delete the value called ‘stcloader’, if it exists.
  4. Exit the registry editor.
  5. Restart your computer.
  6. Start Windows Explorer and delete:
    %ProgramsDir%\STC
    %SystemDir%\stcloader.exe
    Note: %ProgramsDir% is a variable (?). By default, this is C:\Program Files.
    Note: %SystemDir% is a variable (?). By default, this is C:\Windows\System (Windows 95/98/Me), C:\WINNT\System32 (Windows NT/2000), or C:\Windows\System32 (Windows XP).
    2ndthought Adware - Adware removal instructions