How do you back up your Hard drive? Is there any point until this thing's sorted?

Will simply restoring to factory settings resolve anythin apart from taking ages to re install everything?

I tried Quarantining the "qttask.exe" by moving it to another folder and changing "exe" to"xxx" but the problem persists.

Does uninstalling IE and installing Firefox work? Will this carry on in the new browser?

Will the wombat of happiness ever snuffle through my underbrush?

There's not much point in doing a full system backup until you're clean; you'd just be archiving the "nasties" along with everything else. However, it is always a good idea to back up your important documents/data at regular intervals. There are many different backup options (another hard drive/a zip drive/a tape drive, burn to CD/DVD, etc.) some of which depend on just how much data you need to archive. If it's not a huge amount of data, you can just do manual copies to one of the types of media I just mentioned. If have a lot of data, or simply want to automate/schedule the process, you should look into a commercial backup utility porgram like Dantz's Retrospect package. (Maxtor's One-Touch line of external USB/FireWire drives come with a "lite" version of Retrospect which can be set up to fire off backups literally at the press of a button.)



Even if you go as far as a full reinstall of Windows, you'll still get infected in the future unless you take precautions.



qttask is a component of Apple's QuickTime multimedia software. It is not malicious, but it certainly doesn't need to be running as a startup item (this goes for the RealPlayer and Winamp startup components as well). Unfotunately, qttask does have a very irritating way of re-enabling itself. Try going into Task Manager and ending the qttask.exe process before removing the "Run" entry in the registry and renaming/delete the file.



Unfortunately, in modern versions of Windows you can't uninstall Internet Exploder; it is integral to the operating system itself (which is one of the reasons it's so prone/vulnerable to attack). Even though you can't get rid of it entirely, you don't need to use it; one of the foremost recommendations in terms of avoiding spyware/adware is to use a non-Internet Explorer based browser such as Firefox, Netscape, or Opera.



That's rather personal; let's not go there, OK? :mrgreen:

Ay up! Back again... Just to let you know that the "qqtask,exe" according to the castlecops identifier is not the same as "Qqtask.exe" which is the actual quicktime application...They say its known spystuff...

About different browsers, I tried using the MSN browser...

If I restore to an earlier restore point before I ever got the internet I have a sinking feeling that this won't help either.

I'll try and work out how you reply to my miserable missives using quotes instead of recycling all the text next time

Go raibh mile maith agat
(as they say in these parts)