Okay, I’m trying this again. I just typed a long thread and then something stupid happened, so I’m pretty pissed because there’s no way this will be as concise or useful as my previous post.
The other day a friend downloaded a bunch of P2P programs to my computer and, with them, adware.
Lots of silly crap was happening and I couldn’t delete all the adware, so I downloaded Ad-Aware. It detected sixty-one suspicious objects on my computer so it quarantined them and I deleted them. They all had adcrap names like Gator and Bonzai Buddy, they didn’t look like system files.
I also manually deleted sentry.exe and a windows folder file called wjview because these two things were suddenly appearing in my Windows Task Manager (alt+ctrl+del). I’m not sure what wjview was, but it was in c://windows next to a file called wview athat was not coming up in my task manager and makes me think that wjview might be something that is supposed to be on my computer, I’d just never seen it in the task manager before.
After deleing all these objects my computer went apeshit. Explorer literally crashed every fifteen secons with an illegal function message. I started in Safe Mode, went into control panel, then add remove programs. I highlighted Microsoft Internet Explorer and clicked restore properties. Explorer stabilized and no longer crashed. (Oh, I’m on Win98.)
Zonealarm won’t load because VSUTILLANG.DLL is missing.
Other internet programs won’t load because of illegal function messages that read “has caused a stack fault in module KERNEL32. DLL at 0167:bff7c8c7” and “has caused a stack fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 0167:bff7a2a1”. All my internet programs seem to have a problem with KERNEL32.DLL, including my connection program.
However, KERNEL32.DLL is on my computer because it’s listed in the things Ad-Aware is process-watching. (The other modules in the illegal function complaints aren’t listed in Ad-Aware’s process-watch.)
Is Ad-Aware causing problems?
Another program is causing a stack fault in module WSOCK.DLL at 018f:10015bb6.
Programs unrelated to the Internet are also stricken. (Except for Zonealarm, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player, all programs I mention here crash with illegal function messages.)
Programs unrelated to the Internet also crash. Acrobat Reader crashes with a KERNEL.DLL message, but it also has the message, “Acrord has caused an invalid page fault in module MULTIMEDIA.API at 018f:2d8818d3”.
Every few hours Ad-Aware catches a reg key / data miner program called WEB 3000 on my computer. It won’t – or can’t – get rid of this thing that it keeps detecting as adware. I keep quarantining it and/or deleting it, but whatever this is it’s still there.
And perhaps most alarming of all: as Ad-Aware scans my directories, it lingers on c://software/microsoft/internet explorer/xzoomy.com.
Xzoomy sounds like adware to me so I tried to track it down, but c://software doesn’t exist on my computer. Searching or manually browsing brings me nothing.
I’m kind of tempted to delete Ad-Aware and hope everything goes back to normal, but if then I risk deleting what might be valuable information when I take it in for service a week from now.
Any thoughts? I’m hoping someone can say, “Yeah, this is the problem. It’s a pretty simple solution, too.”