Ack! I got a call from Mama Tiger, reporting that she somehow got spyware. A lot of it. To the point where she can’t get online. And she’s not a computer idiot, either. Bastards.
If anybody could get in touch with her to help out, she would be forever grateful. I can’t help, because anything I can think of involves getting online and we don’t know how to get it cleaned enough to do that in the first place. My email is in my profile, and if anybody is feeling particularly kind, please let me know and I can get you in touch with her.
Has she checked under Add/Remove Programs for anything untoward, and tried deleting stuff that way?
She told me she’d tried several things, including that, but the stuff keeps coming back. She’s switching browsers once she gets everything back up, but she can’t do that if she can’t get online!
Check this Pit thread for suggestions, maybe she (or someone else?) can burn a copy of the programs mentioned to CD and install it on her computer? She has my sympathy, as I said in that thread, we’ve had a similar experience a while back. At first, we ran our spyware removers and virus scans, which detected them, and would “remove” the programs. (This particular program would download LOTS of other spyware automatically and stealthily, so we ended up having to disconnect our computer from the cable modem just so it couldn’t bring in the other nasties to the party.) We’d track down the programs, and “add/delete” then reboot, and the spyware would be right back. The spyware would even “uproot” itself from one place in the registry and re-install itself in a random place once the command to delete/uninstall it was given, so that is how it would magically reappear on re-boot. We got lucky in that our computer tech friend spent hours removing all the programs systematically, chasing them through the registry until they were gone for good. Hopefully the suggestions in that thread will help. 
I’ll go look at that thread and see what I can find. She doesn’t mind messing around with the computer, she just doesn’t want to start deleting the wrong stuff. She’s married to a computer geek, but he’s more familiar with mainframe kind of stuff than PCs.
Thanks.
Aha! She managed to get ahead enough of it to get HijackThis and it’s finding all sorts of goodies. I told her about the Pit thread, so she can take care of herself after this.
Thanks, all, for the input – it took hours of patiently removing crap, but finally got it calmed down, then switched browsers and installed the firewall that I was under the impression my dear hubby had installed for me a LONG time ago, and it’s now all quiet. Plus I found a great forum for specific input with HijackThis log files, once again proving that there are good people all over the internet to counteract the bad, bad people.
Man, I do NOT have the patience to deal with this stuff on a regular basis. Here’s hoping it’s all gone. Papa T., of course, could chase stuff through the registry without difficulties, but he’s a thousand miles away right now. It never fails.