There’s a Vx2 plug-in for Adaware. DL it from their site, install it, and run it in adaware. It’ll clean it up quickly and effectively. I had the same problem and I took care of it in under 10 minutes and didn’t have to fuck around with other programs
Oh, thank you thank you thank you!
Although, if I were you, before I do anything else I’d wait to see whether someone knowledgable comes along in GQ. It’s always better to get rid of things manually than through programs because then you can be more thorough. You can get rid of all traces.
And then you can run all the programs in the world afterwards to clear up anything you missed.
What’s IDN?
Well, the Vx2 scan came up clean, thank god. It looks like hpwis, which I’ve dealt with before.
Internationalized Domain Name.
http://www.acronyms.ch/searchResults;jsessionid=DA39937250C1DDDE7CC91F26E91540B2?searchText=IDN
Whatever that means. 
I never have a problem with spyware or adware because I’m a Mac user.
Most of the stuff out there is encoded for PC, and my Mac sees it as a file format it can’t understand. Granted, Macs can be quite a bit more expensive than IBM machines (I’ve been paying for mine for almost 2 years now), but not having to worry about all that junk is one of the major upsides.
Well, I’m not about to buy a new computer, and if I did, I do not like Macs. (No offense to Mac users, but I just do not like them).
No offense intended. Just offering what I know.
Yeah, but can you play Doom and X-Com, Mr. Smarty Pants?
I’m an old hand at Doom (never played X-Com though…)
And that’s MS. Smarty Pants. 
I beg your pardon.
But I’d death match you and your Mac in a second!
And you can add the Spoof Stick extension to Firefox. It revealed the ‘true name’ of the web page- www.paypаl.com
Bother. It doesn’t work with Mozilla 1.7.
I fought spyware and viruses as best I could. At first they weren’t that big a problem to me - back then the way you got spyware was by installing software that included it, and knew not to trust any free application that I did not go looking for specifically, and new not to click yes on any of those ‘bad’ popups. I cleaned my system up with Ad-Aware, and checked it periodically, and never saw anything worse than tracking cookies.
Then some sites started using popups that would install these programs without prompting. I remember the dread I felt when I went to a lyrics site (if you want to pick up spyware, one of the fastest ways is to start browsing lyrics sites) and a command prompt window showed up on my screen and started installing files. I aborted it, but I was full of spyware after I ran Ad-Aware, and I spent hours trying to clean it. Eventually I added Spybot to my anti-spyware arsenal, and eventually got rid of all of it, though I ended up having to disconnect my network cable, and reboot multiple times. I cranked up all my security options so IE wouldn’t do anything without prompting me, and vowed to stay away from lyrics sites.
I still got more spyware a couple of days later. At some point someone figured out how to get it past even the most paranoid of IE users, and soon the trick was being used everywhere, and refined so I often did not realize when I just got hit. I scanned daily, and continud to have problems.
Finally I gave up, and looked into another browser. Chose Opera because I had heard good things about it before and it doesn’t use much system resources. The free version IS ad-supported, but the ads are text-only and so unobtrusive I never notice them - they are confined to a small horizontal bar about the size of the title bar at the top of the window. And since changing I have had virtually no problems with spyware.
I had no problems with Internet Explorer for a long time. I was used to it, it worked well, had no complaints until the spyware problems. And as long as a large majority of users are using one browser, there is just too much money to be made figuring out new security holes, MicroSoft isn’t going to be able to fix them as fast as the spyware writers find them.
One of my big fears is that Opera will become popular enough that it’s profitable to find exploits, but for now it’s so much easier and profitable to write spyware for Internet Explorer that no hacker in their right mind is going to devote too much trouble to breaking my browser. So don’t use Opera. If you want to take the advice of millions and stop using IE, use Firefox instead.
BTW, I do still use Internet Explorer from time to time. Occasionally there is a site that requires a plug-in that I don’t have in Opera, so I cut and paste the address from Opera into IE for just that one site, and close it after I’m done - and almost every time I end up with more spyware on my system.
You’d have to, because that’s how much time you’d have to play before your system implodes.
I just downloaded the most recent version of Firefox, that should be OK, right?
Note that Number helped me out over in GQ- and I want to thank him!
PatriotX
The domain name is the name you see in the address field at the top of your browser (like www.straightdope.com).
From what I’ve understood most domain names employ letters from the english alphabet exclusively, because those are the only letters IE can read. For example, in Swedish, Gothenburg is spelled “Göteborg.” But IE can’t read the letter “ö,” a vowel unique to scandanavian languages. For that reason, the address for Gothenburg’s official webpage is “www.goteborg.se” rather than “www.göteborg.se.” (It might not seem all that different to you, but to a Swede that’s a pretty weird way to spell Gothenburg.)
The IDN feature in Mozilla is designed to allow the browser read domain names written in alphabets other than english. This would be a pretty nifty feature except for the fact that, apparently, the IDN alphabet includes lots of letters that look an awful lot like other letters, even english ones. This means that a spoofer, using IDN look-alike letters, can create a link to a page that looks official (like Paypal), but isn’t really Paypal at all. Click on the link and you wind up at a fake page in which you are prompted to fill in personal information that is then collected and exploited by the spoofer. The domain name in the address field, however, looks perfect (or at least almost perfect) to the naked eye.
Luckily there’s are a couple fairly straightforward ways to protect Mozilla and/or Firefox from this vulnerability. For Mozilla Suite, which is what I use, you can download the latest “nightly build,” for example: Mozilla 1.7.6. It’s not the official build but its just as stable and comes highly recommended (you even get the new spell-checker with it if you want). Otherwise, you can create a file in you Mozilla folder with Notepad, type in a piece of code that disables the IDN feature, and save it under the name “user.js.” I did this as well, before I got round to downloading the newer version of Mozilla, and it worked like a charm.
If the IDN feature is active and you click on the Secunia link, you come to a fake paypal site. If the IDN is deactivated, you get a 404 message.
Dr. Derth:
Actually – not to bum you out or anything – but I don’t think so. Try the Secunia test and see how it works. If you arrive at page that looks like an official Paypal cite, you have the vulnerability.
Sorry, am posting from work. Gotta go.
Do tell.