Welcome to the club.

I got tired of fixing my computers because my girlfriend kept installing crap
every time she used it.

My solution was to remove her account from all my pcs and get her a pc of her
own.  Once I had it all setup with just Windows (not even office and other
stuff some people find essential), I took a backup image of the hard drive,
before letting her loose on the poor machine.  Note: having the clean image
with nothing installed was the key to my plan.  She was in charge of 
installing
all of the apps she wanted to use.

The first time around, after two months of begging me to find out why her
machine was too slow, I simply restored the drive's image, she lost everything
she had installed because I did not bother salvaging anything before the
restore.  When she asked why I answered, "maybe you should contact the tech
support people of all this crap you install here and ask them why your system
is so slow and full of viruses".  After this happened for the fourth time, and
losing everything every time, she finally gave up and started to ask 
about what
she should or should not install in her machine.  She's getting the point, but
still not all there.  It'll take another couple of restores with complete data
loss before she fully gets the concept.

Give it a try :)


-Mario



Quoting Bob Axtell <engineer@cotse.net>:

> My wife is ready to throw me out of the house because I
> got rid of her smileys (Smiley Central).
>
> Smiley Central is adware/malware that invites people to install
> smileys for use on their email. Once installed, smiley takes over
> the PC, replacing decent search engines with their fraudulent
> search engine "MySearch" and "WebSearch". If you previously
> have Google hooked in ANYWHERE, it will redirect it to their
> fraudulent search engine. When you USE their search engine, no
> matter what link you click on, the engine redirects you to one of
> their PAID links, NOT what you clicked on.
>
> If you try to uninstall smiley central, it comes right back and re-installs
> itself! The only way to get rid of it is to  use a malware killer, like
> ad-aware.
>
> If all that wasn't enough, it slows the PC down to a crawl, like it is
> climbing Mt Everest all the time.
>
> I tried to install commercial smilies (a paid-for program) but my wife
> doesn't like it ("Get Smile").
>
> Here's what I need help with: how can I install the smileys without
> the other bad things? Is there a way to just have part of it working?
> Or am I forced to hack the program to dismantle the bad pieces?
>
> --Bob
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