cant get rid of a program (Search Assistant)

[swiftmachine]

i have windows 98. that is all i know about this cpu. i am trying to uninstall a program from the add remove programs and the it will not uninstall. what do i do. i know that it is causing problems on my cpu. Please help

[dlh6213]

Boot into Safe Mode and then go to Add/Remove Programs and try to remove it.

What program is it and how do you know it's causing problems?

[swiftmachine]

search assistant. is the name of the program and it tells me uninstall failed.
the reason i think its that program, is because i know every program on my cpu and that is the only one i haven't seen till i started having problems.

[Bad Karma[CORE]]

What could help is reinstalling it, then uninstalling. Maybe the uninstall routine is just damaged

[dlh6213]

I doubt if you could deliberately reinstall it even if you wanted too, but don't do it! This is a browser hijacker and needs some specialized removal tools.

I'm going to move this to the Virus forum as that is where we deal with problems of this sort (if you do a search on DaniWeb, you'll find others with the same problem).

First, go to this thread and use the tools recommended there such as CWShredder, free online virus scan, etc.
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread5690.html

Then, get HijackThis from here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/

After you install hijackthis, 'Scan and Save Log' with it; when it's finished, a log will pop up; copy the entire contents of the log and past it here.