PCA Forums

One of my friends has a teenage daughter and needless to say her PC is always full of crud....

Spybot keeps finding "MyWebSearch" and can't remove it... any tips on how to manually remove this thing...

Also, are there any good freeware firewalls or is the internal XP firewall as good as you are going to get w/out a router?

Thanks

mywebsearch has a stealth re-installer
located in teh registry here
hkeylocalmachine/software/microsoft/windows/current version/run, runservices and runonce

First thing I do is disable any startups in the registry before I even run a spyware cleaner. MSCONFIG is no good for this, and unless you like going through the registry manually I HIGHLY recommend Startup Control Panel: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

I also recommend that you use Startup Control Panel while in safe mode, so that there aren't any background services running that will replace whatever you disable.

Then reboot and run Spy Sweeper/Adaware/Spybot.

If Startup Control doesn't work, you'll need to use Hijackthis. http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html

I had a nasty browser hijack once, where a dll was being loaded at startup, but Startup Control wasn't showing it. I removed all spyware and virues, but when IE was opened, the system got reinfected.

It takes longer, but I'm startingto get in the habit of running my preliminary spyware scan (usually Adaware because it's quicker) in safe mode. Most of the spyware won't load in safe-mode unless it's a service, and a quick check of the services in MSCONFIG and TaskManager lets you know if anything strange is running.

Originally posted by Lmandrake
Also, are there any good freeware firewalls or is the internal XP firewall as good as you are going to get w/out a router?

Thanks

http://www.kerio.com/kpf_download.html

Free for personal use.

The best I've used. You'll get a lot of prompts at first asking for permission. But, it's good and seems to catch anything trying to get access.