Hello Everyone,
I am not very technically inclined - at all - but I found this website while searching for an answer to my question and I'm hoping someone here can help me. I am very confused. I run Windows XP at home with IE 6.0 and was checking my history last night to try to get back to a page I had closed. I found links to websites that I have never visited. I know that pop-ups will show up in history even if they aren't visited, but one of these links indicated several pages that had been visited. I am the only one who uses my computer. If I understand hijacking correctly, my internet homepage would have been changed, right? It was not. But how is it possible to have sites in my history that were never visited? The sites were gay.com, happypride.com, and outpersonals.com. I'm so confused. Can anyone help? Thanks!

When my computer was infected with spyware, I had sites like that in my history that I hadn't visited either. While waiting for one of the experts to reply, you could run an Adaware and Spybot scan and let them fix anything they find. Then you could download HijackThis, save it in its own permanent folder, not a temp one or on your desktop, make sure all browser windows are closed, and scan. Save your log and copy and paste it here for one of the security experts to have a look at.

Thanks so much for the info! I really didn't know anything about spyware and so I was very confused. Hmmm....spyware Sounds evil to me. Thanks for helping this computer moron get over a great deal of confusion. I was trying to figure out who was breaking in a using my computer and whether I knew that they were gay or not. :o Thanks again!

Homepage hijacking is definitely one symptom of spyware, but certainly not the only one. Spyware (and adware) can be on your computer without you even knowing it -- for awile anyway; eventually it starts causing problems that let you know something's wrong.