Search window popup is a pain in the ASCII
Okay, so here's my problem, a few months ago, I started having an issue where every now and then (not all the time mind you, but maybe 2-3 times a day) my IE pops open with a search page displayed. Sometimes it happens while I already have IE open, sometimes it launches even though IE is not already open. My first reaction of course was to scan for spyware. Neither Ad-aware nor Spybot search & destroy found it despite running with the latest dat files on both. At that time, the search engine that displayed was allcybersearch.com. So being a bit of a sleuth, I dug into the registry and found that allcybersearch had hijacked my default search page plus other assorted allcybersearch entries and ditched them. This seemed like an obvious solution, but a day later it turned out to be wrong. What happened then is that the popups kept appearing, but now with my own default search page. I then got a utility that lets me see all running tasks (I'm running winME, so I can't see hidden tasks in the task manager) but found no unusual tasks running. Since then, I've been downloading and running every dat update from ad-aware and spybot in hopes they would come up with something but still to no avail (although spybot does indeed list allcybersearch as one of the plagues they detect).
So here's where I'm at. three months later the search page still pops up a few times each day. interestingly, the search page that's displayed is whatever page I happen to have my default page set to. So it appears that although allcybersearch perhaps initially hijacked my browser search page, and perhaps installed the automated search page launcher, the launcher isn't intelligent enough to recognize that the page it's launching isn't allcybersearch. Of course I've been through all the usual suspects including the autoexec, netstart.bat, startup folder, win.ini, system.ini, and registry run keys for both users and machine and there's no sign of this thing being launched from any of those places...
I'm stumped (oh yes, and although I could do a system restore to a point prior to the onset of this problem, I'm far more interested in finding the source!)
Any clues out there?
Thanks.
-R |
