problem after coupon toolbar installed/removed

[bornitz]

I have a Sony Vaio RS-610 running XP Home Edition SP 2. I'm also usin
Time Warner Cable Modem for high speed access.

I inadvertently installed a coupon toolbar in IE. When it interefere
with my web browsing, I tried to remove it. That's when the problem
began.

Things I can't do:
1. Cannot access most web sites (microsoft.com, google.com, yahoo.com
regardless of browser.
2. Cannot connect to IBM VPN network via AT&T client.
3. Cannot connect to Yahoo Instant Messenger.
4. Cannot download updates to Symantec/EZ Armor AV and any othe
program that required internet access.

Things I can do:
1. Connect to my customer's OWA email.
2. Connect to customer's VPN, run my unix admin stuff (Exceed, putty
Yahoo Messenger from within VPN)
However, yesterday I was able to access non-blocked sites fro
withing the VPN and today it's messed up just like outside the vpn.
3. Connect to AOL Instant Messenger.
4. Run AOL and do some web surfing from within
(google and yahoo top level is ok, mail.yahoo.com won't load)


I called both RoadRunner (Time Warner) and Sony customer care and th
gentleman from Sony spent quite a bit of time having me try differen
things to no avail.

1. Roll back to a few days before I installed the adware/spywar
toolbar
The rollbacks initially failed, but I later tried it in "safe-mod
w/networking" and it seemed to roll back. However, this did not resolv
the problem.

2. They felt that the malicious programs corrupted winsock, so we trie
to the following:

a. downloaded (via AOL) and ran Winsockxpfix - didn't help
b. downloaded (via AOL) and ran LSPfix - didn't help
c. ran "netsh winsock reset catalog" - didn't help
d. ran "regsur32 softpub.dll" - didn't help
e. manually removed winsock and winsock2 via regedit and reboot
re-install tcp/ip - didn't help.

Their last suggestion was to back up needed files and run the Vai
Recovery Wizard to completely wipe out the pc and reinstall.

This is still my last resort and I'm hoping that someone has a bette
idea. It will take me a week to re-install/reconfigure everything.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Also, if I absolutely have to re-install, is there a way to re-instal
the base OS (from CD if I can find one) without losing all of m
programs and data? I thought I remember my roommate doing this with X
Professional several times on her Vaio last year.

Thank you in advance,
Bonni

 

[KB]

I have a Sony Vaio RS-610 running XP Home Edition SP 2. I'm also using
Time Warner Cable Modem for high speed access.

I inadvertently installed a coupon toolbar in IE. When it interefered
with my web browsing, I tried to remove it. That's when the problems
began.

Things I can't do:
1. Cannot access most web sites (microsoft.com, google.com, yahoo.com)
regardless of browser.
2. Cannot connect to IBM VPN network via AT&T client.
3. Cannot connect to Yahoo Instant Messenger.
4. Cannot download updates to Symantec/EZ Armor AV and any other
program that required internet access.

Things I can do:
1. Connect to my customer's OWA email.
2. Connect to customer's VPN, run my unix admin stuff (Exceed, putty,
Yahoo Messenger from within VPN)
However, yesterday I was able to access non-blocked sites from
withing the VPN and today it's messed up just like outside the vpn.
3. Connect to AOL Instant Messenger.
4. Run AOL and do some web surfing from within
(google and yahoo top level is ok, mail.yahoo.com won't load)


I called both RoadRunner (Time Warner) and Sony customer care and the
gentleman from Sony spent quite a bit of time having me try different
things to no avail.

1. Roll back to a few days before I installed the adware/spyware
toolbar
The rollbacks initially failed, but I later tried it in "safe-mode
w/networking" and it seemed to roll back. However, this did not resolve
the problem.

2. They felt that the malicious programs corrupted winsock, so we tried
to the following:

a. downloaded (via AOL) and ran Winsockxpfix - didn't help
b. downloaded (via AOL) and ran LSPfix - didn't help
c. ran "netsh winsock reset catalog" - didn't help
d. ran "regsur32 softpub.dll" - didn't help
e. manually removed winsock and winsock2 via regedit and reboot,
re-install tcp/ip - didn't help.

Their last suggestion was to back up needed files and run the Vaio
Recovery Wizard to completely wipe out the pc and reinstall.

This is still my last resort and I'm hoping that someone has a better
idea. It will take me a week to re-install/reconfigure everything.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Also, if I absolutely have to re-install, is there a way to re-install
the base OS (from CD if I can find one) without losing all of my
programs and data? I thought I remember my roommate doing this with XP
Professional several times on her Vaio last year.

Thank you in advance,
Bonnie

what was the name of the coupon toolbar or service?

 

[bornitz]

here's a link.. but even thought it claims to be free of spyware, I
would never do this again:

http://tinyurl.com/8edvb

Meanwhile, it turns out the pc was fine once I rolled it back to a few
days ago. There's a network problem in my house. I moved everything to
another room, restarted cable modem and router and all is well.

But I still learned my lesson about spyware and adware!

Thanks so much!
Bonnie