Unwanted Ads running on my computer

[Jo Ann]

Just wanted to let you know that I went on a website
yesterday afternoon that must have been infected with all
kinds of files that load programs onto your machine.
I've never run into this before. I had about 8 new icons
loaded on my desktop and new program files added to that
directory. I was getting all kinds of pop-ups totally
outside of IE and MSN.

Luckily friends stopped by to go out with us to dinner
and he had the same problem this week, only not so
badly!! He had a computer friend help him out and used
Ad-Aware.com free software to find the (360!!) ads and
delete them. I had to reboot and run again about 4 times
to get the ads under 10. I'm running it once a day now
and shutting off my computer at night - Yeah, I had
Gozilla, zula, along with E-Bay, screen savers and other
junk that I hadn't loaded myself. I ran spy-bot too to
catch the cookies. I also have McAfee virus protection
running.

Odd thing is that when I do Cntl-Alt-Del there are still
all kinds of thing running on my computer and I don't
know how to get them out. And I don't know what is
needed and what isn't. I may have deleted some stuff
that I shouldn't have too - will find out as we go with
this!

Whew! It was a mess, but my computer is ok now! I think.

Ok - question is why can't I delete some files? I went
into Program Files and tried to delete some files that
were loaded that day that I didn't load and I got an
access denied message. Seems that the program is in use,
but I don't know where or how to find it!! I did delete
the associated .dll files so hopefully it can't do
anything. But does anyone have any idea of what to do
with this?

 

[Guest]

To delete certain files you will need to ensure that they will not run on
startup, and there are a couple ways to do this. One, click Start, Run, and
then type msconfig. Click on the startup tab and either uncheck the programs
that you do not want to run automatically or click on disable all. Then,
restart your computer, a dialog box related to msconfig will come up, just
click ok or yes (I can't remember exactly what it says). Then proceed to
delete away.

Another way to prevent items from running on start-up is throught the
registry editor. Click start, run, and type regedit. Navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, Current Version, Run (also
Run Once) and delete any entries there (or just delete the entries for the
files that you are trying to delete). Also navigate to the same folders
under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE directory and delete the undesireable entries,
look under any other folders that start with the word Run, there can be quite
a few.

Hope this helps. Always be careful not to mess around too much in the
registry editor. You can export the entire registry as a backup by clicking
File and then Export and clicking on the All radio button.

 

[Guest]

As an ammendment to my previous reply make sure to restart the computer after
editing the registry and before trying to delete the offending programs.

 

[Roberts]

By any chance were you browsing the internet as an XP Administrator? If you
create another user that is a "Limited Account" new programs can't be
installed.

Also do you have a firewall of some kind? That'll help keep worms from
installing new software on your system that runs at startup.

roberts