On a somewhat related note.......(this site is ok, so stay calm)
It's more like, What happened to the homepage on my computer?
Answer: some nasty spyware writer's CoolWebSearch code has hijacked my homepage in Internet Explorer (and sometimes AOL) to about:blank but yet it comes up with a "search engine" looking page.
This thing is really nasty; everytime I try to replace "about:blank" in my internet options with "
http://www.audiblebeauty.net", the stupid code replaces the address again whenever I'm not looking. It's very annoying.
Ad-aware, Spybot, and even Norton do not stop it; it is going to take some heavy-duty registry editing to kill it (or, if that doesn't work, a wipe and restore of the hard drive).
The jerk(s) who coded this are trying, apparently, to sell--get this--ANTISPYWARE tools. Wait...isn't that blackmail?
->Buy our stuff to get rid of our malicious, obnoxious stuff?
->yeah right, as if that'd ever work.
So anyway, to end my sad, annoying story, I just want to warn anyone who may be caught unawares by this thing. i was. and now, it's too late for anything like Norton Go-Back™ <which is a very nice tool to have for restoring your hard drive back to saved points (which it saves automatically), and which i'd recommend>. just trying to keep everyone informed.
Beware the adware.
--<Later>
Phew. I've finally managed to get rid of it. If anyone has had this problem, I, among many others, recommend CWShredder. It worked on the first try. Now I've changed to Firefox (mozilla) for my browser, and am just trying it out. Hopefully I'll be bidding adeiu to much unwanted spyware.
Edited By ryanadc on 1098921978
