Sorry if this is in entirely the wrong forum. Whilst tooling about on the internet, a message popped up to tell me that I had been infected with spyware. I’ve run spybot and adaware, which both report a clean system. However, the bloody thing has changed my desktop into a huge link to some site purporting to remove spyware. How do I restore my nice, boring old desktop?
Thanks for any help.
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Spyware is not mundane nor pointless.
Let me move this over to General Questions. You’ll get some good advice there.
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The preachy bit first: you acted upon a pop-up, purporting to be a warning, but this pop-up did not come from any AV or spyware software you had installed for yourself? That’s a bad thing - some (possibly most or all) of the browser popups that say ‘your computer may be infected’ actually link to malware or at best, woefully ineffective removal programs intended to harvest your contact details (by way of the registration/signup process).
Anyway, try Panda Activescan. If that doesn’t work, try downloading and running HijackThis; paste the log file it creates here - it will analyse it and (hopefully) tell you what’s wrong.
I got sucked into installing one of those bastards a few months back. It’s probably one of the Variants listed here: http://noahdfear.geekstogo.com/
The tool on that site worked like a charm. Best of luck.
Cheers, Omniscient - desktop is now nearly normal, although it still appears to be functioning as a webpage rather than a - well- desktop. But at least that frigging annoying message is gone. I owe you a drink!
Mangetout, I’ll try your links now. Thanks for your help!