In the course of my surfing, i have picked up a toolbar that attached itself to my Internet Explorer and refuses to go away. I have tried going to View>Toolbars, but nothing i do seems to work. I have also tried right-clicking on the offending toolbar in order to try and find an options menu to get rid of it, but am out of luck.
The toolbar itself has a few buttons – Internet Privacy (ironic!); Online Gambling Services; Dating Services; Credit Card Services.
It also has its own “home” button. When this button is clicked, it takes me to a website called slotch.com, which i have never heard of but assume are the bunch of fuckers who have suaddled me with this annoying extra.
So do you mean when you go to View|Toolbar, there’s nothing out of the ordinary listed? For example, is there just a floating check mark with no name next to it? Sometimes when these toolbars install themselves, they’re designed not to have a name and thus the user isn’t sure whether he should close it or not.
Sounds like you got hit by some spyware, though. Have you installed anything recently, like Hotbar? I’d download and run Ad-Aware if you haven’t already.
I suggest you check your hard drive for any new .exe files added on the day this problem began. Look in C:, or C:\Program Files, or C:\Windows. Once you identify the culprit, then we can know better how to proceed to banish it. Just the other day my hard drive was infected by rb32.exe, and once I found out the file name, I Googled for it and found instructions on how to rid myself of it. Simply deleting the .exe is not always enough, because malicious code sometimes has a way of regenerating itself unless you hack it out of the registry.
I have found Spybot Search and Destroy to be much more effective than Ad-Aware. It caught and vanquished many more spyware files that Ad-Aware had missed.
I managed to find the toolbar’s source in my Program Files section. There was actually a whole new folder there, containing an executable file as well as bitmap images and a .dll file. I was able to get rid of the executable file by using the Add/Remove Programs function, but the bitmaps and .dll file remained. I couldn’t delete them because it said that the .dll file was being used by Windows. I eventually figured out that i had to restart the computer and delete the .dll file BEFORE doing anything else. If i opened IE first, the .dll file would begin running and would not be deletable. Anyway, i eventually got rid of it.
I downloaded Ad-Aware, and it got rid of some other stuff that i didn’t know about. Then, when i saw Jomo Mojo’s post, i also downloaded and ran Spybot, and it did indeed find quite a few things that Ad-Aware had missed.
