were any of the things you found called "cool web search"? or simmilar http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html for the removal tool for that it also helps to go through your program files and look for oddities there also beware any "odd" programs that may be in the grey legal area to start with kazzaa is shipped with a slew of scumware (use kazzaa lite if you must) note well the distinction opera is adware (though you can pay for it to take them out) icq is adware gator is scumware cool web search is scumware kaazaa ships with a whole heap of bundled scumware whose purpose is to download other scumware (ad-infinitum) people put ads in their legit software to make some cash in return for making that software, i'm not too keen on it but if it gets me the software i want at the price i want (ie free to me) then alls well with the world. the distinction being scumware as a rule "sneaks" onto your computer, it exploits JScript holes (btw I would reccomend to people using IE moving to the sun java platform, afaikr microsoft and sun had a big argument, end result is microsoft cant do anything javaish anymore (well in regards to IE anyway)) generally practice a "slow download" so users on dialup wont notice, generally are written crappily and all togther suck. its subtle i know. ;-> -----Original Message----- From: pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Dave Dilatush Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2004 11:48 PM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [OT:] Adware Aggrevations >Peter Moreton wrote... >my 2-cents worth: I just this week started using the free version of Opera. >I have to say that it makes IE look very old-fashioned indeed, and I now use >Opera for all web browsing. I only intend to use IE occasionially, to keep >'up to speed' with this product, as I'm an IT professional, and have to be >competent with MS products. Opera is far, far better. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with Opera after you've had some more time with it, esp. with regard to security; I'm becoming very irked with this ad-ware problem and don't want to repeat the experience. To update on my original post, the problem is still there despite repeated anti-virus scans and running Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, and I'm about to give up and just wipe the HD clean and re-install WinXP from scratch- and then use Mozilla or Opera in place of Internet Exploder. A goodly part of the angst is coming from the fact that I'm relying on one computer to do everything: e-mail, WWW, CAD, word processing, photography, everything. So having to re-install WinXP means having to re-install every one of my applications, a huge task. I'm now thinking that it might be worthwhile to pick up a second computer, a cheap, low-end machine, to serve for e-mail and WWW only, and reserve my existing computer for non-internet applications ONLY. So if the internet box gets trashed by the kind of mal-ware that's plaguing me now, doing a complete OS re-install won't be such a big deal. This sucks. Dave D. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.