So, I’ve got these things hiding in my registry. My various anti-virus and spyware detectors don’t catch them, but I don’t recall installing them or know why they would be on my computer. From what I’ve read about these online, they don’t appear to be connected to any programs I’ve installed and I don’t know why I’d have them. What do they do? Can/should I get rid of them?
For the record, I’m running Me on my computer and for the first time loaded the Windows updates, so maybe these come from that.
I’d like to thank you in advance for your help.
MicroQuill Smart Heap: This looks like it might be beneficial, but I don’t know why it would be installed on my computer. This isn’t one of those things that uses my idle processor time to find aliens/render CGI is it?
Lake Dolby Hph: No idea. Doesn’t appear connected to my audio playback program.
Intel Psis: The only reason I’m concerned about this one is that it came up as “new” and I don’t recall seeing it before.
ace compression: I haven’t installed this program, is it normally bundled with something I would use?
There were actually several more items that I could figure out, but these were the ones that’ve got me stumped.
Thanks for the info. I figured that the items probably weren’t spyware and just bundled programs that I didn’t know about, but I’m the sort of person who gets paranoid when they run three anti-virus scans from different programs and nothing comes up (there’s got to be something wrong!), so I was just looking for confirmation.
It’s worth noting that much of the current round of malware and spyware plunks itself in your Windows (WIN32) in my case and System32 directories as DLL’s. They’re worth checking out using Explorer; if you have not recently installed any software and have DLLs in one of those directories that were added fairly recently, check their properties to be sure they aren’t something valuable that got tweaked by recent CPU activities, then delete them. (Occasionally they’ll claim to be “in use by Windows” – which means you have to search the Registry for them and delete them from there first.) There are also a couple of .EXE files that get dumped into there or your hard-drive root directory without your consent that do much the same thing. (I had the interesting experience recently of having this happen with a file called WINLOGON – which is of course the name of the Windows login utility. Noting that I had two such processes running, I found that the real Microsoft-origin WINLOGON.EXE was in System32, and that my system had acquired a version without documentation in the WIN32 directory two days previously. And of course, being named with a file tagged as a critical name by Windows, it wouldn’t delete. I finally renamed it JUNK.EXE (which seemed appropriate!) and then could delete it.