homepaqe hijackers

I'm assuming you've already tried your "Tools", "Options" to reset your homepage?

 

Ps104, I'm going to bet this search engine loaded itself as a program. Not sure what you're using but I'm using XP. Find Add Remove Programs and search for that name. Remove it! You can block the home page off your contents/ security page too but I'm going to bet it's loaded itself. Iwon.com did that to me and pretty much took over my computer.

Also, clean out all your cookies after doing that search. I'd also recommend you go to search/ Find files and folders and search your hard drive for *.tmp files. The first time I did that, I had 3719 temp files! ICQ was the cause of most of them! You can safely delete any file with .tmp at the end of it.

Diane

 

Mine allows me to select all and then delete. Click on edit and find select all and then file to delete. XP has that option openly displayed.
What platform are you using? What's the name of the crazy search engine?

Have you ever gone to www.virtualdr.com ? They can help with any concern! I've learned almost all I know from there or trial and error.

Diane

 

You could Restore System (or System Restore, depending on your platform) to before it began!
Clear History too!

Try that! Do you remember when it first showed up?

Diane

 

Try clicking on Search. A box should appear on the side. Look at Change Preferences. Click on Change Internet Search Behavior. There's places in there to choose which search engine to use for search.

Diane
(Can't spell tonight!)

 

Have you run Ad-aware and/or Spybot yet?

If not, you should give them a try.

 

I had something similar happen just a week or so ago.
It ended up being a hijacker program and I deleted it with something called CoolShredder. Yours might be different, but it is a highjacker and if you cannot remove it by using Spybot you'll need to look up exactly what it is and see if there's a removal tool for it online. With mine, SpyBot removed it but it came back if I restarted my computer, but the shredder got rid of it entirely, and it only took a few minutes to download and run.
Gina

 

Ad-Aware is a popular and dependable tool for fighting against this kind of stuff. The free version and it's updates are enough to help you fight hijackers, spammers and spies.

You can install it for free from Download.com. The company that offers it is called Lavasoft.

http://download.com.com Ad-Aware

I've never seen this program fail to do an excellent job of sniffing out the bad guys.

 

SpyBot Search & Destroy is much more powerfull than Ad-Aware.

http://download.com.com/3000-8022-10194058.html?tag=lst-0-2

 

I had this problem when I first got highspeed internet. The only program I could find to fix it is called HijackThis. It allows you to see what programs are loaded at startup and remove the offending entries. Do a search on google with the name of the webpage hijacking your homepage and you should be able to find some message boards discussing what entries to remove. Here's the link for the program.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html

Also, make sure you have a good firewall setup after you do this. Believe it or not, I just have the Windows XP firewall activated and have had no problems since. Good luck.

Shawn

 

Any of the above mentioned spyware programs should take care of this. If you are using IExplorer, stop it, using any microsoft software to access the net is asking for trouble.

And I'm not saying that just because I work for a competitor (or at least we were till last week ) Thats a clue to who it is.

Download Mozilla, or Firefox from Mozilla.org, Opera is a good browser too.

A firewall is a great idea. Go to google and type in zonealarm, its free, and works well.

 

You can also get some really good utilities at Karen Kenworthy's Site. http://www.karenware.com/

Two I use a lot are 'Cookie Viewer' and 'Registry Pruner'

I also use 'Registry Ripper' which will allow you to search the Registry for a 'string' and then save the found Registry Entries out before deleting them.

Diane and the rest can check these out and make appropriate recommendations.

Ad-Aware may be the best choice, though. 'Pest Patrol' is also pretty good and has a trail version that may cure this one.

Reg-Pruner finds and allows deletion of registry Entries that no longer have validity.

If you find the sub-directory something is hiding in and can delete it. reg-Pruner gets rid of the registry entries that were associated with the deleted sub-directories.

Re-Ripper on the other hand is a Search and Destroy for registry entries. WARNING: YOU CAN REALLY TRASH YOUR SYSTEM WITH THIS TOOL!

But, for Reg-ripper to work you have to know what to search for.

This doesn't sound like a 'Cookie', IMHO. it sounds like a rogue program (virus or trojan) has added a registry entry to check if it's still active, and, reload itself if it isn't. Usually, the source to reload from is named something entirely non-obvious.

Ad-Aware and Pest Patrol are usually pretty good about having the names of these items...

I use 'Zone Alarm' and NAV (Not the full utilities set) and so far I've been 'secure'.

 

Do me a favor:

Click on Start, then Run. Type in Regedit, and click on OK.

(Warning: We are NOT deleting anything at this time; merely looking for something)

Click on Edit, then on Find. Type in iexplore, and hit the Find button.

You'll have two columns. Left side looks like folders, right side is gibberish.

On the left side, you're looking for a folder that says "Open Home Page"; you'll need to keep hitting the F3 key (Find Next) until you see the folder on the left side, and it looks like it's open.

When you find that, if you're able to from the poorly worded instructions above, please let us know what the "gibberish" on the right side says (the "key" value for that folder). Also any key values for subdirectories of that folder.