Google 2011 Redirect / Hijack Virus - How to finally get rid of it

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have never run across a beast like this before! Once I caught it every Google, Bing or Yahoo search would be redirected to a bunch of low rent ad sites. I finally wound up using Altavista search, which I suppose is such a minor search engine player they didn’t bother hijacking it.

NOTHING would even detect it. Not Nortons, Kasperky, Super AV, Malware bytes, etc. etc. There was a prior Google virus that Nortons and Kaspersky had standalone removal tools for, but these did not even detect the virus. Hijack this showed nothing suspicious.

I spent days on this problem. In using Altavista I finally sussed that it was a rootkit virus of some kind, and I finally came across this odd little anti-malware package with imperfect grammar, but by God it worked!

http://www.regrunreanimator.com/security/

Thank you Reanimator! All the other big boys were helpless and you saved the day.

2

Do you know where the rootkit came from?

In your shoes, I would probably just reformat and reinstall as needed, but first I’d want to locate the source of the infection. Then after reformatting, I’d change my passwords to everything.

No disrespect to Reanimator, which I’ve never used. Getting a virus just leaves me with a not-so-fresh feeling.