I need help in tracking down a file...

[Confused In Netscape land]

I'll try to make this brief. While using Netscape
Navigator I saved a target picture to a friends desktop
and saw an annoying "download manager" pop up listing
every last item that my friend had downloaded in the past
year. I asked my friend why he would ever allow this
monstrosity of privacy abuse to continue and he asked me
to get rid of it for him with an evil smile on his face. I
first tried to simply use the download manager to clear
out the history by selecting all of the items in the list
and hitting the "remove from list" button. this caused the
application to freeze. I closed netscape, opened it back
up again with the task manager open to monitor the mem/cpu
usage and was astonished to find out that just removing a
single item from this list caused his athlon 2500+ to max
out for several seconds... I then tried to remove a full
page of items from the history and it took the program
over 20 seconds to accomplish this little tiny fraction of
all the items listed. It was no wonder it froze when I
tried to wipe them all. So I asked myself why in the world
it would possibly need that much cpu usage to delete a few
meager lines of text out of some file. The answer is of
course that that is not all that it is doing. My best
guess is that it is deleting and adding new entries into
an encrypted file somwhere elese on my friends computer.
Now here is where I need some help. I cannot find the file
which contains either the original info nore a file which
might be used to store a much larger list if items as they
are removed from the computer. I am sure that there is a
tool out there somewhere which would allow me to view all
of the files currently being accessed by the computer. I
have tried to use a windows search to find the most
recently accessed and or modified files in the Netscape
directory, but found nothing that rout. It is very likely
that the file is not even in the progam files folder. Any
suggestions?

 

[Overlord]

I'd first run Adaware or Spybot to see if it can detect and possibly
remove the app. At the very least it should give you more information
about this "manager".

Alternately, Task Manager should tell you the name of the file that is
running. Find it and kill it, or at least shut it down and take a
look around the directory it is in for the other file.

Or, look in Admin Tools / Services and see if it is starting as a
service and disable it.

Or, download Startup.cpl which will tell you all the apps that are
firing up whenever you bootup. It will let you enable, disable, or
delete them from the startup list. It does more than pull them from a
startup folder, it groups them according to where they are in the
registry. All the little crap like Quicktime trying to phone home
every time the system boots to look for new versions will be in there.

You might also do a Google for Pesx. It makes a properties page (when
you right click on a file and select properties) called Dependencies
which shows .dlls and such that are "connected" with the file, or
Dependant on it. Run it on the "manager" and perhaps you can find the
other files it accesses.

If the util is saving and encrypting all the files downloaded.....
I'd DL and start running ZoneAlarm's free firewall as it not only
keeps other systems out of your computer, it also catches other
spyware on your system trying to get internet access OUT.
Where would you suppose all that encrypted data is going?

I'll try to make this brief. While using Netscape
Navigator I saved a target picture to a friends desktop
and saw an annoying "download manager" pop up listing
every last item that my friend had downloaded in the past
year. I asked my friend why he would ever allow this
monstrosity of privacy abuse to continue and he asked me
to get rid of it for him with an evil smile on his face. I
first tried to simply use the download manager to clear
out the history by selecting all of the items in the list
and hitting the "remove from list" button. this caused the
application to freeze. I closed netscape, opened it back
up again with the task manager open to monitor the mem/cpu
usage and was astonished to find out that just removing a
single item from this list caused his athlon 2500+ to max
out for several seconds... I then tried to remove a full
page of items from the history and it took the program
over 20 seconds to accomplish this little tiny fraction of
all the items listed. It was no wonder it froze when I
tried to wipe them all. So I asked myself why in the world
it would possibly need that much cpu usage to delete a few
meager lines of text out of some file. The answer is of
course that that is not all that it is doing. My best
guess is that it is deleting and adding new entries into
an encrypted file somwhere elese on my friends computer.
Now here is where I need some help. I cannot find the file
which contains either the original info nore a file which
might be used to store a much larger list if items as they
are removed from the computer. I am sure that there is a
tool out there somewhere which would allow me to view all
of the files currently being accessed by the computer. I
have tried to use a windows search to find the most
recently accessed and or modified files in the Netscape
directory, but found nothing that rout. It is very likely
that the file is not even in the progam files folder. Any
suggestions?

~~~~~~
Bait for spammers:
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
(e-mail address removed)
~~~~~~
Remove "spamless" to email me.

 

[Ndi]

No help here.

But I can tell you, as coder's experience, that they are not stored in a
text file, as one needs to store data like local file, remote file,
progress, referrer, last server response, etc. If it's a file, it's
INI-style or a custom form file.

Such files are NOT indexed and deleting requires iteration. Since it's not
sorted, Netscape needs to locate the item you selected in the file and
delete it. Thus, each file you delete, it needs 3000 iterations to locate,
then move all items up one level. It's why it takes forever and processor is
sky-high.

I ran into these problems with simple lists so large info should be highly
susceptible to this. AND it's exponential. Deleting 100 items or 1000 items
is below a second. 2000 might take 3 secs and 3000 might take 10 minutes. I
can't be sure since I didn't write Netscape but I'd bet my month salary that
it's exponental.

It would be a good idea to hit "del" and go take a shower. Just because it
delete 20 items in a minute doesn't mean that 1000 will take 50 minutes.
Actually, after that stupid exponential level it will probably take 2 more
seconds to nuke all files.

 

[Fay]

All user specific info for Netscape is kept in \Documents
and settings\{username}\Application
Data\Mozilla\profiles\{user}\xxxxxx.slt\ (the xxxxx's are
random characters which are created at install. There are
2 CACHE folders, one for current & one for deleted
(trash). These contain files with no extention & are
randomly named. As long as Netscape is not running, you
should be able to delete these files. Also, there are
settings in "preferences" with deal with caching &
downloading settings. You should start by limiting the
caching in there & then deal with the deleted cache.

Hope this helps. Oh, one other thing, you will not find
anything running in services or task manager as the other
posters suggested.