How I (Finally?) Beat Spyware
I think I've finally solved the spyware infestation on my PC, at least for now. While sometimes feel like I've beaten the topic of spyware to death in the last month and a half or so, this nasty stuff has beaten the living daylights out of me. I have lost untold hours, no ... make that days in the effort to remove spyware from my primary Windows computer. Through it all, this has been a frustrating task. Every time I thought I had the nasty intruders beat, they came back, as if to say 'Nyah Ha!'
This is pretty interesting to me because I just quashed my own infestation of spyware. My wife recently switched from using Netscape to IE and within a couple of weeks her computer was a mess.
The worst offender was something that Ad-Aware called VX.BetterInternet. This little ... gem ... was always marked as in-use by Windows so Ad-Aware couldn't nuke it. And to top that it always had itself set up in the registry keys that cause a rename on reboot (stuff intended for use in software installers), so Ad-Aware's ability to take out a program at boot time was dodged. A co-worker sent me an ininstaller specifically for VX.BetterInternet from it's maker. The uninstaller is apparently only available if you threaten legal action or otherwise get in the author's face. One of VX.BetterInternet's functions was to download other spyware and hijackers. With it gone her computer is much better. And she's now using Mozilla.
SpyBot S&D was oblivious to VX.BetterInternet and Ad-Aware was toothless against it's tricks. I ran a trial copy of SpySweeper and it seemed to get rid of it, after that Ad-Aware didn't see it anyway. But it came back within 24 hours, just after I signed up for a two year subscription on SpySweeper.
