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You insensitive clod, not all people want NT 4 SP2 on their win 98 boxes.

Seriously though, the first thing which goes on is the latest McAfee Stinger. When that's wiped out most of the viruses, I uninstall their out-of-date Norton - so many people don't realise that the major antivirus vendors are on a rental model and just buy the product and expect it to last forever. Then Avast! Personal Edition goes on, and the PC is fully scanned. After that comes Spybot and Ad-Aware. I use both because each product has its stregths and weaknesses. All of this is done form a CD burnt with the latest patterns so no internet connectivity happens until their PC has been cleaned. And then Sygate Personal Firewall completes the mix of security products.

After that comes Thunderbird and Firefox, The GIMP and Audacity (if they are into that sort of thing. And of course we musn't forget IrfanView.

You can find the standard (free) edition here.

Of course, you'll want to search and make sure I didn't send you to a trojaned fake site first, but that's the right place.

It would be hilarious to find that it wasn't your machine that was infected, but that your provider was running its DNS services on MS-Windows boxes, and some fool with admin privileges on one installed the spyware by mistake.

In the meantime, do you still see bad DNS redirects with your provider, or did they magically clear up soon after you Asked Slashdot?

Whenever I go to windows update and there is a new version of their update control, it prompts me to download it.

okay. what i did not say clearly in my previous comment is that there is a check box option when it prompts for downloads that says "always trust
from X". If you check it, you will no longer be prompted, and it will always download automatically software from that company. A previous comment stated that the only places that his computer "trusted" were microsoft and macromedia. What I was trying to explain was that I never opt to "always trust" from any site, however, it seems that once gator install once on your computer, even if you clean it out using ad aware, it will still always trust Gator Corp., and even though I checked through my trusted sites listings under the advanced options in IE, it does not list any site at all, therefore, they must be using 'crooked code'.

My advice to you would be to step away from the computer... choose a career in fishery and wildlife where you will be as far away from computers as possible. Maybe you could watch for forest fires in Colorado, I hear there is a job opening.

I appreciate your job suggestions - I was really hoping to get an unpaid position a flame baiting anal-retentive troll here on slashdot, but you obviously have that position locked in.

One of my clients brought me her laptop because "it was running slowly" - (piii 500, 128 MB ram, win98se). I booted it and it was really dragging. So i installed lavasoft's ad aware program, and scanned her HD and she had 360+ spyware programs & elements installed in her system!. What I hate most about the spyware programs is that they eat resources, and mask the process from the operating system. if you use the task manager, most of the procs aren't even listed, but for instance, in her laptop, on boot 85% of the system resources were being used. As soon as she launched her web browser, or any other program, she was using 100%.

Also, when doing research, some of the lower quality sites have it set up so that gator autoinstalls when you hit the page, it doesn't even ask for a confirmation. I suppose the site gets $.05 or whatever from the gator corp per install, but what a lousy way to run a business.

Unapproved software shouldn't be allowed, and I'd add anti-trojans like Ad-Aware (which I use and am pleased with) plus Moosoft Cleaner (with TCActive configured to disruptively high priority -- I'm still figuring out if I can work this tho) just to be sure.

My 2 cents.

You need to download refupdate which will download the latest adaware datafiles for you. It's good practice to run this at least once a week to keep the datafiles up to date (and run adaware straight after, of course)

From what I understand, the altnet stuff comes (will come?) piggybacked on the "b3d projector" advert program that the KaZaA installer automatically installs for you (without prompting if this is ok). You can see it briefly at the end of the installer when it pops up its own installation window in the top left of the screen for about half a second.

KaZaA lite doesn't install this (but it'll still be there if you haven't fully purged an old version of KaZaA from your system. Get adaware for that)

They most certainly DO make a clear connection. It's spelled out in the 3rd entry of the FAQ (Q: What will happen to the program if I remove the spyware?). On top of that, the user is allowed to backup all the things they are removing and then restore them later, if needed.

The spyware installers sure don't make anything near this clear and easy to remove!

Naw, the author of RadLight has superficially apologized after catching a lot of heat, so I don't think this is going to continue. He actually said, and I quote, "...the point was NOT to destroy the adaware [...] BUT TO SHOW WHAT COULD HAPPEN IF THE PROGRAMS START UNINSTALLING EACHOTHER [sic]." Friggin' hilarious. You can read more of his amusing ass-kissing excuses and lies at the Lavasoft forums.