I hate spyware!

So here is what happened. One day last week I wanted to change my buddy icon however I use gaim and it would not let me. So I download the latest aim and I could not figure out how to use an icon that I already had. So I download an old version of aim. I change the buddy icon and life is great! Or so I thought. Two days later (last Wednesday) I went on vacation to Florida with my band. I come home and my clock in my room was blinking. Ok, the power went out. I go to my computer to find no less than 30 (im not kidding) IE windows open, about 4 extra icons in my system tray and 10 extra proceses running. So I spend a long time deleting, running AdAware, SpyBot, Ewido, Security Task Manager, and Adware Away. Three days later, I still have spyware but I have no idea where it is. Neumerous dormant programs run only at night or when my comp goes idle for long amounts of time and bring back a bunch of stuff. I want to reformat, but I am wayyyyyy too lazy. That was my rant for the day.

have you tried running scans in safe mode? That tends to pick up the stuff you'll miss.

Spyaxe and spyfalcon are some of the latest PITA spyware apps that may still be living in your system. There's some scripts out there that remove these automatically, you can find them on google.

Applications like Spysweeper grab some of the variants but not all. Adaware is useful for the moderate stuff but doesn't seem up to the task of doing anything like effectively killing running processes.

I'm a big fan of programs like Spysweeper because they block this junk from getting on there in the first place, unless you allow the install/download or turn Spysweeper off. In a few cases even Spysweeper can't remove something that it could block, so I'm not a big fan of the 'aftermath' removal strategy. Stop the stuff from coming in so you don't have to jump through 10 hoops to remove the infection.

I found out that I had some trojan incorperated with everything. Kapersky did the trick. All in all, I used over 9 programs to remove everything.

i had spy axe and after searching found 2 removal tools that did work that were published by the creators thers countless forums dealing with these two and most will have links to the tools

Every time I see one of these threads I'm glad I'm running a recovery card. Best money I ever invested.

THE JEW (RaVeN) said:

Every time I see one of these threads I'm glad I'm running a recovery card. Best money I ever invested.

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Vat is this? I just started using Norton Ghost to run weekly backups on a POS hard drive I had sitting around.