can't get rid of smartsearch.ws

[John Pike]

Somehow smartsearch.ws has taken over my Windows Internet
Explorer. It made itself the default search engine and
home page. I have gone through the registry and changed
all search pages to google and all home pages to msn.com.
When I restart explorer, it comes up with smartsearch as
my home page and all searches go through smartsearch. I
checked all my startup folders and nothing was in them to
load it. I checked control panal to remove the program but
its not there.

How can I get rid of this smartsearch that has taken over
my browser?

 

[Curtis Koenig [MSFT]]

I would suggest a third party spyware/adware removal tool such as spybot or
adaware. This is technically known as spyware and these programs should be
able to remove this particular browser hijack.
--
Curtis Koenig
Support Engineer
Product Support Services, Security Team
MCSE, MCSES, CISSP

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to the newsgroup so that others may benefit. Thanks!

--------------------

 

[Jeff Kuehl]

Had the same thing happen to me. Go into registery and
find each instance of that and delete, that may fix that
and bring up another one. Just do the same thing, and then
go to internet explorer and change the default homepage to
what you want, and restart and never go to that page
again

 

[vishworks]

Hi guys,
The best way to destroy such killers is to follow the logical
approach:

Use a tool like regmon (to monitor who writes to registry entries).
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/regmon.shtml

Set the filter (in the options settings) to search for "smartsearch"

This will give you the name of the program that keeps trying to update
the registry keys with the smartsearch.ws entries. Identify the .exe
program from the regmon results, and kill the .exe program from the
"Task Manager". Then go ahead and manually delete this .exe file (it
will generally be a hidden file). Now manually delete the entries in
the registry.......... and boy .... you're the winner !!!!!

Regards,
Vishy
(In case the above fails (highly unlikely), feel free to contact me.

 

[Damien]

Hello

Go to this website and dowload Shredder

http://216.180.233.153/~merijn/files/CWShredder.exe

It will fix the problem immediately.
If you can't get to this link on your infected computer, then push
ALT+CTRL+DEL and close iexplorer. Then retry.

I got this off a German guy called Daniel on another Post, it worked
for my computer. If this doesn't work then look at some other
postings.

OK Bye

 

[mrossi23]

for eliminate smartsearch from the pc, you have to find iexplore.exe
inside the pc
but ATTENTION if you have windows xp you have to set the condition of
"find" that infact the iexplore.exe is a process that has been
installed on your pc in many directories (probably WINDOWS, and
SYSTEM32) the name is the same of the browser
internet explorer but it is inside the directory programs.
Windows xp has to be abilitated to find all the files, also the hide
files, infact
this is a hide file.
You have to eliminate it, e then you have to go to register and
eliminate all the smartsearch that you find, so smartsearch is
ELIMINATED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Say me if this is corrected !!!!!!

Excuse me for my english but i am more good with computer !!!!!!