Help! My Homepage has been hijacked!

No matter how many times I keep on setting my homepage in my IE6 browser control by in Internet Options, my Homepage keeps on going to this ungodly search engine with a strange URL like this: res://mshp.dll/index.html#22776

Any ideas how I can overcome this?

Search google for AdAware, and Spybot Search and Destroy.

Install and run both.

Spybot, Adaware

You have been hijacked and infected. Feels really slimy doesn’t it?

You need to run up to date antivirus scans as well as spyware tools like Adaware and Spybot. Here are instructions that should help you:
http://delltalk.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=si_virus&message.id=1825

One more vote here for Spybot, which rocks. It’s free, and it really works, especially for getting rid of Evil HomePages which install themselves in your computer.

No - use BOTH programs.

I can advise from long experience on several different computers, including those of friends and colleagues that I’ve helped troubleshoot, neither AdAware or SpyBot is invincible. Both often pick up nasties that the other one has missed. The last example of this was AdAware - latest reference file etc - missing some Gator stuff.

Thanks everyone! It worked! By downloading the three programs below, I was able to get rid of that mofo spyware worm – which a virus scan won’t detect btw.

As per your suggestions, I first went to this page, then dowloaded and extracted the following free shareware in this order:

  1. cwshredder

  2. Spybot 1.2

  3. Ad-aware

Spybot and Ad-aware must be extracted after it is downloaded. Thanks everyone for the excellent tips and good luck to all with the same problem.