Over the last three weeks, I've had a severe infestation of the pop-up hijacker ISTbar (the XXXToolbar variant) and the "data miner" spyware AproposMedia (aka CxtPls, the PeopleOnPage variant).
Thanks to some RTFM (reading of the fine manual) and the spyware detector and remover XoftSpy v4.13, I finally got rid of them.
For reference, here are the entries on the two spyware programs.
- ISTbar
- Flare SciFi Forums - I tried the instructions here for the better part of two days; I could not find all of the registry keys using
regedit, and so it came back more than Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th horror series. I had almost given up and decided to reinstall WinXP Pro when I cam across XoftSpy. - DoxDesk - home of a nice encyclopedia entry on the bugger
- Computer Associates' eTrust Spyware Encyclopedia
- Symantec - distributes a fix that did not work for me
- SpyAny.com - describes variants and putative specific procedures for removal
- Pareto Labs - makers of XoftSpy, which finally eradicated the problem
- Flare SciFi Forums - I tried the instructions here for the better part of two days; I could not find all of the registry keys using
- AproposMedia
- DoxDesk
- Computer Associates' eTrust Spyware Encyclopedia
- Symantec - distributes a fix that did not work for me
- TopSpywareReview - they recommended XoftSpy, which finally eradicated the problem
"Use Firefox", I know, but as you probably also know, not running IE is not as cut-and-dried for Windows XP users as all that. Windows Media Player and other applications kick into it for various functions. Also, I maintain multiple whole sets of GMail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL accounts, and I'm not sure how to factor my cookies into two completely disparate sets of tabs. Is Opera any more stable since the disastrous version 7? If it's relatively more resistant to spyware, I'm thinking about running it instead.
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Banazir
