Have you tried UNinstalling IE completely now that you’re using FireFox (asks the Mac user)?
Someone actively hacking your computer is not very common, true, but there are plenty of disreputable websites (e.g., some porn or file sharing sites, or sites masquerading as something legitimate like travel information) that take advantage of security holes and exploit them to push malware onto your computer. It doesn’t even have to look like software you think you want; in some cases it installs silently, completely in the background.
To my knowledge you can not uninstall IE. But I might be wrong.
-FrL-
Oh my God, I think something’s trying to uninstall Service Pack 2!
I keep getting an error message “Can’t find the file …NTServicePackUninstall…” (ellipses for several numerals and other symbols.) The only use I know of for that folder is to use one of the files inside it to uninstall the service pack.
I can only hope that there’s a typo in the program trying to do this which makes it permanently unable to find the file. (If I rename the file, will that screw up the OS? I would think the OS does not, itself, get into that folder for any reason. Why would it?)
I can also only hope that if the program ever successfully accesed that file, the OS would ask me to confirm, or show me that it’s happening so I can cancel, or whatever.
Oh my God. I’ve gotta get this thing offa my computer.
-FrL-
You can roll it back to IE4 but that’s it!
It sounds like the symptoms I had not too long ago when I contracted the Virtumonde trojan.
This trojan came in through a weakness in Java 1.4. You should upgrade your Java version.
I used VundoFix to clear it up. Nothing else worked, because this piece of trash malware has a couple of different pieces that find ways to repair the deleted parts as you’re trying to uninstall it.
I tell people there are only three basic things I do to keep my computer clean. I promise your life will improve if you do these:
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Use Firefox almost exclusively. You won’t get driveby downloads, because it doesn’t know how to do Active X.
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Install the free AOL/Kaspersky antivirus. I know it says AOL on it, but that’s just badge-slapping. It’s really a good product made by Kaspersky.
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Never use Windows Media Player. Ever. There’s absolutely no need, ever. Use Zoom Player or VLC Player. Install ffdshow, and you can play anything out there (almost), and with some more patches, even the weird stuff. The point is that these players don’t know how to go to web pages or accept weird scripts. So if you download something malicious, they just go blank instead of fetching that trojan.
You can still get driveby downloads with Firefox. I contracted Vundo while using Firefox, because it attacked a hole in Java.
A pretty decent player too. I like the way it can set a movie to play as “background” whilst you continue to do all other computer related things on top of it. Recommended.