I was recently at a friends house and while on their PC I noticed it was extremely sluggish and laden with pop ups. He's using an older gateway with a pentium 2 running 98SE with a cable internet connection. I asked him if he had ever gone through his system and removed spyware and he had no idea what that even was. I installed search and destroy for him and ran the program to remove the spyware on his system. This removed 73 different pieces of spyware. Unfortunatly now IE is showing an error where it can't locate the server. All of the lights on the modem indicate that there is a connection there so it seems to be a matter of communication between the computer/IE and the modem. I tried undoing everything but that didn't help, it just put the spyway back on his computer. Any thoughts on this? Does anyone have any experience with this happening? I did catch something about a 180 file while going through search and destroy. Something about it being removed without my knowledge and it needed to be reinstalled but low and behold it has to connect to the internet to download it and since he can't connect to the internet it doesn't matter. I also went through and installed all of the critical windows updates as well but it was working fine after that. Another note, search and destroy was not able to remove all of the spyware on the first time around so I had it run on start up after the reboot. IE worked prior to shutting down and after rebooting and removing the last of the spyware that it couldn't remove the first time around is when IE seemed to quit working. Is there something I can download and burn to disc that I can take over there to help restore the original settings and get him back online? If anyone can help and needs additional info let me know and I'll post what I can find. Thanks!
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Jump to PostThe "180" file is a piece of the 180 Search Assistant malware. You didn't remove all of it, so now it's "kindly" asking to be reinstalled.
SpyBot alone will not be able to fix everything. You should, at the least, also get
Jump to PostCool- after you do the Ad Aware and SpyBot runs, make sure to run HijackThis and pull a copy of the log so that you can post it here. We'll look over the log and see if there are still traces of any Gremlins.
Jump to PostYou should put hijackthis.exe into it's own folder for when it creates back-ups.
Close all (browser) windows & rescan with hijackthis. When the scan is finished place a check in the box to the left of the following entries & click 'fix checked':R1 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Bar =
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