The picture explains it all, if you need more info just ask, this is really bugging me. Any help would be most welcome.

Hi Ant,

The symptoms point to a virus or malware to me, but you can't see these running in the normal ME view (in XP you have a processes tab, but ME does not have this).

I would suggest you download ProcessExplorer from http://www.microsoft.com/techn ... ties/ProcessExplorer.mspx and see if there are any wierd processes running. Try closing any down which you do not recognise one at a time and see if the problem goes away.

Also, you can use msconfig (START >> RUN >> MSCONFIG) to check what items are started at boot up and see if any of them look "wierd". If you are unsure about a particular process, just google it and look at the top 2 or 3 hits - should be enough to decide if it is a good or bad process.

Hope this helps!

Tim

ahh me, there's your problem, full of random bugs

Try running this: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Spybot is great for catching those unwanted malware progs

short list of useful apps:

- hijackthis: http://www.hijackthis.de/en
- adAware: http://www.lavasoft.de/index.php
- spybot: see post above

Also try Spyware Terminator.

http://www.spywareterminator.com/

Already did all that...spybot, adware..antvir...avg...sophos...checked MSCONFIG...nothing new......think I'll go look at reg edit.

At work we had huge problems like this. All normal spyware programs were run (Adaware, spyware blaster, spybot search and destroy, etc.) I personally found PestPatrol a long time ago. Using it on the work computers after all other programs found no more errors, PestPatrol found over 800 hijackers.

http://www.pestpatrol.com/

You can do a free scan online or download the trial software. What you describe is exactly what was happening at work with browser hijackers. They are not like ordinary spyware.

A tip, stop downloading p0rn and music from P2P services .

Oh yea, you can attempt to clean it all yourself, but there will be many files that monitor it and will reinstall itself if found to be deleted. It will drive you buggy trying to clean manually.

You could run HijackThis (link above) and post here the log (if no confidential information is disclosed and if forum rules allow such a non-lfs related activity in the technical assistance section), or take a look at HijackThis (Info on selected item gives you some hints) and concentrate on Search Pages and suspect Browser Helper Objects and Startup Programs. Also, with Hijackthis, you should check in the misc tools section if the hosts file has been modified: normally the only uncommented line would be the one referring to 127.0.0.1 localhost, by the way if there are some particular (good) reasons the hosts file could be used to resolve something else than that.
As usual I suggest to take care: crippling your machine with HijackThis is nearly impossible, but if you disable things you're not sure about you could easily end up reinstalling some apps or having some trouble. If you're not sure, ask.