Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Halp !

I think I've accidentally installed some spyware software on my machine (no, I did not go to any porn site). I keep getting this dialog box each time I open Internet Explorer - the title is IEHelper and the content is 'Failure sinking events from IWebBrowser2'. Google searches didnt really help me apart from pages displaying dire warnings about spyware installations.

Does anyone know what I need to do ? Help much appreciated.
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9 comments:

  1. itsjoyOctober 16, 2002 at 2:21 AM

    Think http://www.cexx.org/transponder.htm will help.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sidcarterOctober 16, 2002 at 2:37 AM

    Install Linux and your problems are gone :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. madhavOctober 16, 2002 at 3:02 AM

    Tried that link, but sadly I dont have the registry key called 'transponder'. It does sound similar though..thanks anyway !

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  4. jackolOctober 16, 2002 at 3:49 AM

    If you're on Win2000/XP go to Start | Run and run "msconfig". See the startup tab and disable automatic startup to anything that looks fishy. Is a good start. And if you get the unnecessary stuff out, you can improve startup times too.

    If you are on 95/98/ME, there is a similar utility but I've forgotten the name. It is something similar in name though, just run a find to all EXEs in the win-dir and you should see it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. itsjoyOctober 16, 2002 at 4:38 AM

    oh i thought that was it.. maybe its a variant of transponder. its a pretty old post (Aug 24, 2001) so maybe the spyware guy got wise to ppl getting rid of it and named it something else.

    Will let u know if i find something..

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  6. charlesjOctober 16, 2002 at 5:40 AM

    If I'm not mistaken, "msconfig" is the startup configurator for 95/98/ME and not 2000/XP. So in case you're running 98/ME, this *is* a good hack.

    In that, look for files which lead to some obscure directory. Uncheck them so that they don't startup with Windows next time.

    Alternatively you could do Ctrl+Alt+Del when Windows has just started and note down the processes running in the background. Once you start IE, observe if there are any additional processes which you didn't directly execute. Search for the filename and if safe, delete it off.

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  7. charlesjOctober 16, 2002 at 5:48 AM

    And in case you wanna experiment, run "regedit" from the Start>Run menu. Type F3 and search for any relevant string like IWebBrowser2, IEhelper etc. etc. In case you happen to hit the jackpot, go ahead and delete the values, and if you think it to be safe, delete the whole key. Be careful though. ;-)

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  8. alsoraviOctober 16, 2002 at 6:53 AM

    Fuck technology. Go back to using the abacus, and you won't need linsux, or winblows.

    ReplyDelete
  9. jackolOctober 16, 2002 at 9:06 AM

    Its definitely msconfig on Win2k/XP, could probably be the same on 95/98/ME too. Been a long time since I used those.

    ReplyDelete

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