Computer people HELP!

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?

Did ya try out the suggestions in this thread yet?

If you have, the best solution is to download and run Hijackthis. Don’t make changes, but post the log at http://www.spywareinfo.com for analysis.

Here’s my spyware removal method. You can post the HijackThis log here if you want.

Thank you all.

While I will be cleaning this spyware out of my machine, I have decided to take the plunge and install Firefox.

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.

SD