Re: Off Topic: Hijacked

On Sun, 8 May 2005 11:43:06 -0700, "Starlord" <starlord@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>Late last night while trying to get a driver to work my XP got hijacked and
>even with the anti-virus and MS's own anti-spyware running, it still got
>hit. Now I get blasted ads and IE's about blank is shot too. I now get a
>message on the desktop about somekind of a error and the active desktop pic
>can't be displayed, something about error in VXD VMM (01)
>trojan-spy.html.smitfraud.c and as the XP disk didn't come with the machine
>( it's a used one ) I can't run it to fix whatever.

You might try this; Look at the running processes in "Task Manager."
See if you can i.d. the one causing the problem. Generally, if you
sort them by the amount of memory they use, these things show up
using about 1-4 megs. Looks for words in the process such as "ad."
If you are curious about any process, looking it up in google will
generally tell you if it's a regular MS process or something else.
Turn off all you're other programs when looking at Task Manager to
help isolate the process.
Once you're sure it's the one, then use the command line (DOS)
accessory prompt and erase the process from that point. Just type
"del" and the process name on the command line. So, it might be
"del adcount.exe" or whatever the thing is called.
Reboot. It might work.
Switch to Firefox from IE, if possible. Also, download and run the
free version of Pop-Up Stopper.
Lastly, download a copy of registrymechanic and let it check the
Windows registry for bad or alien entries.
-Rich

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