From 2 to Now 3 Tools Not to Live Without

So I had some complaints from friends of a propblem occuring on their computer. This was multiple friends who naturally live in multiple houses. These are responsible friends who have Anti-Virus and Adaware both running on their computers. At least one of the 2 had a pop-up blocker since I installed it at their home. Their problem was alomost EXACTLY the same. Whenever they surfed the internet they were getting lots of popup ads and this is what caught my attention, both complained of a "Lycos" search window coming up whenever they performed a search at any site. This got me to thinking, there must be a common thread here. 2 friends both w/ Lycos popping up. Both friends also noted they had a virus but it was healed/quarentined (they used diff programs)

Being the responsible friend I am, I went and spent a few minutes surfing geocities, and angelfire to see if I could get this virus. No virus yet. I had to take drastic measures. I decided to look for less desireable sites. Sure enough it was only minutes before a virus got caught and healed by my AVG anti-virus and so I performed a search and boom, I had ads from Lycos.

I then performed a full system scan using adaware, it found and delteed ALOT of items, but still the Lycos window was popping up. I ran a full system scan w/ my anti virus, no viruses found. I performed a Google search, and there was the Lycos window still. I had succesfully replicated their problem. Yay Me!!!


Now the question was, how do I get rid of it? It seemed to me that it was adware not spyware so I went to the Lavasoft site and did some reading, there was a plugin for searching your LSP or "search" files on your computer. They all looked good to me but one rsvpsp.dll. I don't know why it stood out, but it did not seem to follow the naming convention and seemed to have to do w/ returning information.

The I found it. It was a spyware hijak. I needed a piece of software called Spyhunter to remove it. I paid my $29.99 downloaded and ran the problem. In a about an hour it had found 32 files and reg entries that Adaware had not found, and fixed the Lycos problem.

Problem solved!

3 Tools You Need on Your Computer
Anti-Virus
Adaware
Spyhunter!