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General discussion

Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart

Dec 5, 2003 11:21AM PST

I opened an email recently that has caused my home page to get reset to a porn site when I restart. How can I find this garbage and delete it? I am running
Windows ME on a Dell Dimension 700. I have IE6. Can anyone help me with this. Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Re:Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart
Dec 5, 2003 12:50PM PST

It's called Spyware, and sadly the default settings on IE will allow people to just install this crap on your computer without even so much as a dialog box popping up to ask you about it. It's just one of many reasons why I switched to Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) for my web browser.

But to solve the problem, download your spyware removal tool of choice. Ad-Aware, Spybot, or whatever, and run it. Chances are it will find a great many things you didn't even know were there. Delete them all, and rest a bit easier. Then be sure to keep that program up to date and run it weekly to monthly to ensure you stay spyware free in the future. Also, since you own a Dell, don't expect any help from them at all on this issue. They've passed down an edict to their tech support people not to even give unofficial advice on this subject.

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Re:Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart
Dec 5, 2003 8:07PM PST
HijackThis is a general homepage hijackers detector and remover which you can download.
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Re:Re:Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart
Dec 6, 2003 1:03PM PST

I wouldn't recommend it for the novice. It's a great tool to run and then post the logs so more experienced people can look at it. If someone were to delete everything the program reports, they would trash their computer because the tool reports everything that is running on the PC, not just malware. Much better to try AdAware and Spybot, an online scan and then if the problem persists, run HijackThis and post the logs.

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NT - Thanks for discussing that in case the user decides.
Dec 6, 2003 9:00PM PST

.

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Re:Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart
Dec 6, 2003 1:31AM PST

Same thing happened to me and I also am using ME. The other advice give so far in this thread should be followed. I ended up doing a system restore before I could get rid of the problem but it worked.

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Re:Home page gets reset to an unwanted site at restart
Dec 6, 2003 1:19PM PST