Re: Very "hard to kill web search varmint"

From: mac (macknever_at_fsmail.net)
Date: 05/13/04 

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 14:30:07 +0100

"Donald McDaniel" <orthocrossNOSPAM@ATiinetDOT.com> wrote in message
news:10a6s5p1q3ntd4e@corp.supernews.com...
> Hawaiian Tim wrote:
> > After recently geting my browser attacked by some sort of
> > cool web search and trying to get rid of it I found it
> > very hard to kill It woulkd not let me access Mcaffe web
> > site downloads, changed registry values that shut down
> > virus controlls,spy bot, ad aware, coolweb shreader,
> > hijack this, Everything I could think of Finally wasting
> > so much time I wiped my hard drive,reinstalled windows,And
> > it got me again before I had time to download mcaffe again!
> > (online purchase) so I bought the cd and Installed first
> > but still had to sign on via internet, Blasted again!
> > finaly was able to do it fast enough on 3rd try. This
> > varmint is good.Any more help on this subject would be
> > appreceiated.Mcaffe shows 26 blocked events in one hour!
>
> Too bad there's not a utility to remove Yahoo's hijacking of the browser
> home page. Once you set My Yahoo as your home page, you can't reclaim the
> home page for another site unless you delete your Yahoo account.
>

"Some ISP's provide a customised version of IE. Some Web pages will also
reset your home page and do this. One of the customisations they might make
is to disable the ability to change the home page, so that you are forced to
use their home page. You can re-enable this by making a small change in the
Windows registry.

In Regedit, navigate to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control
Panel

In the right-hand pane, right-click the "HomePage" value, then select
Modify. Change it to: 00 00 00 00

Also change either or these to zero 0 instead of 1 if present:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explo
rer] - DWORD "NoSetHomePage"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\Restrictions] - DWORD "NoSetHomePage"=dword:00000001

If you don't have this key, browse to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

and in the right hand pane, double click "Local Page" and set equal to
"C:\WINDOWS\System\blank.htm" (no quotes) which will hopefully set your Home
Page to blank and then allow you to subsequently modify it using Internet
Options.

Exit regedit and reboot.

When you reboot, you should be able to change the home page again.

Some pages will also download a program which keeps changing it back. Go to
Start | Run and type:
msconfig
and press <Enter> or click OK. Go to the Startup tab.
See if you can identify any suspicious programs. If you can, uncheck it, If
you can't, change the home page to what you want and then uncheck one and
then reboot. Try IE. If the Web page changed, change it back and then try
msconfig again, rechecking the last one and unchecking the next. Keep doing
this until you find the culprit.