A good FREE spyware removal program???

[LouSiffer]

Anybody know where I can get one???

[OnlineStageGear]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

Adware and Spy Bot.
Adware 6

Spy Bot

Run them both. What one misses, the other will get. They are a must if you are going to use IE.

Matt

[LUVGUN]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

Those two programs may be the best combo. But, they don't catch everything. I have been trying to get rid of some spyware on my comp for weeks. I have run both programs and it still pops up everytime I start up. They have really cleaned up alot, and my machine is running much better now. However, they just didn't catch everything.

[YetAnotherOne]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

Tony, did AA/SB not find the programs or were they unable to remove them? There are a few more things you can do though I don't recommend them unless you more or less know what you're doing.

You can use the utility "Autoruns" available from this site to manually kill off things that start at boot time but are tough to track down. If AA/SB found something and can't remove it because it's running, this might allow you to block the startup and allow AA/SB to kill the offending program. Of course if you don't know 100% for sure that what you're killing off is actually not part of Windows you could really screw up your system.

Another great utility for killing off resident spyware that you don't know how to stop is End It All. Again, stopping the running spyware should allow you to use AA/SB to remove it if either located it.

Another good one is Hijack This available from this site. It lists pretty much everything the might conceivably be spyware and allows you to blow it all away piece-by-piece. Problem is that lots of the stuff on the list will be part of Windows or software you actually installed. Choose wisely if you blow anything away with this utility (I haven't tried his others but they look promising as well).

One that I found very useful is ie-spyad. This is just a list of sites that (at minimum) cram tracking cookies onto your machine and (at worst) hijack your browser and install spyware. Installing this adds a really huge list of these offensive sites to Internet Explorer's "Restricted Sites" and will pretty much disable the ability of these sites to interfere with your Internet usage. Problem is that the list includes things like google.com and lots of other useful sites which may nag, complain, lose functionality, and/or block your usage of said site until you remove it from the list of "Restricted Sites". Having the list installed is probably worth the pain of: a) remembering it's there when problems crop up, and b) manually removing sites you use from the list; particularly if you have a lot of problems with spyware.

There's lots & lots of other stuff out there but I found these particularly useful for correcting & preventing problems.

[OnlineStageGear]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

There are some out there that we have found that there doesn't seem to be a program to remove it and we have tried um all. One creates 3 spy programs every time the PC is rebooted. It sticks the three in one of you "My Documents" folders. The format command seems to get rid of it though.. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Deneb]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

To get rid of spyware that the programs miss, it requires a little bit of computer knowledge.

You start up the computer, and see what runs when it starts up. All the executes, .dlls and crap, if you see something that look suspicious, check the date it was added (though if you're a good programmer, you can easilly modify this to say something different when someone gets it on their computer).

Try and remove it, and if unsuccessful, then restart in safemode, you can remove things, while you're in safe mode.

If you've been surfing like free porn sites, you're going to get some spyware, and usually the better the free porn, the more dirty the spyware. I've had to deal with quite a few cases of it, with computers that I've worked on.

Pretty much, note the time/date the comp starts acting up, and then search for programs/files altered or made on that day/time frame. They can be any size, but usually hover in the 5-15K, and are getting larger, with the higher amount of people on broadband, than before.

[LUVGUN]

Re: A good FREE spyware removal program???

[ QUOTE ]
Tony, did AA/SB not find the programs or were they unable to remove them?

[/ QUOTE ]

AA/SB Did not find the programs. They both say no immediate threats found. I have checked what systems are running at startup and was able to kill off a few things. However, There is still one little sneaky one, that must be listed differently, that I cannot find.

Thanks to all for the great suggestions. I will definately look into them all.

Thanks again, guys! [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]