I have recently picked up a rather nasty piece of spy/malware (two maybe) that neither spybot or adaware is able to get rid of!
First there is Lycos sidesearch, every time I run a search on another engine, Lycos chimes in with its opinion, how do I get rid of this.
The other problem is worse, and has slowed down my computer considerably. Something is creating hyperlinks to ebay auctions in the middle of web pages. Example: I was reading the recent sdmb thread on video games, and in one post someone mentioned cedar chests, the word were highlighted as a hyperlink, that that led to a lisiting of ebay auctions. Looking at the post on another computer shows that the hyperlink did not exist in the post, something is examining every web page that I load (and taking a great deal of time to do it) and creating these links. Has anyone else heard of this, and how do I get rid of it?
Good advice all round, I’ve had the insert-links-into-webpages one before (tho’ for me it was Amazon links every time the word ‘book’ was found !). I could stop it by doing Tools/Internet Options/Advanced and unchecking ‘Enable Third Party Browser Extensions’ in IE. This will disable all extensions including useful ones tho’ (i.e. Google Toolbar). This at least means you’re not waiting a minute for each page to load.
I couldn’t get rid of it in using the normal SpyBot / AdAware things but I just kept trying every so often and eventually it was gone. I guess they must have updated the spyware list eventually to include whatever it was. It’s also a good idea to run SpyBot / AdAware in Safe Mode as well (and make sure you have nothing else running, not even browser windows).
I’m not on an XP machine to check but I also think that the IE in XP with Service Pack 2 has a dialog that’ll show you the browser extensions installed and give you more control over deleting them.