Asafecenter.com?

[boofhead]

My son's computer has been hijacked by a crappy virus protection program called asafecenter.com. I resides on the task bar and pops up warnings about spyware and the like. It also has taken over the IE home page. No matter what I do this web page opens when IE is opened, and the preferred page (Yahoo) is not allowed to open automatically and as instructed through the IE internet tools. It also gives spurious popups warning of spyware and the like, and when these balloons are present, the computer freezes until they are acknowledged or cancelled manually.
Also reported are problems with the DVD players (he has three) that will allow a movie to be run for only a short time, then errors are reported and theplayer shuts down.
He also has problems running games, which freeze or boot off after a few minutes.
He has AVG Free, and that program does not report any viruses or spyware, although I don't know that AVG is good at spyware in any case.
How can I disable and remove this web page or program or whatever it is? How can I force IE to use Yahoo as the preferred web page? Is there a good free spyware program I can use to remove this annoying program? I cannot find it in the Add/Remove programs list, and using msconfig/Startup does not remove it either.
We use Windows XP pro, a Pentium 4 and IE7.
Thanks for any help..

[The Nr Fairy]

This any use ?

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index.php?qid=20070707004707AAH60eF

I use Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/) and Ad-Aware, never had a problem they couldn't fix, bit I'm picky about what I download.

[Whirlygig]

I got had by one of those programs a while ago and sadly, the only way I could get rid was to download a spyware program to erase it.

I also use AVG but the free version is literally just a virus detector rather than spyware - you might have to pay!

Cheers

Whirls

[P.Pilcher]

If you do a google search on asafecentre, you will find plenty of recommendations for it's removal. The only problem is which solution will cost little if any money! There is reference to the majorgeeks forum there which is frequented by experts dedicated to eradicating the problems your son is having.
I had a bit of a problem a few months ago so I joined their site. Before posting a query, they ask you to carry out a through cleansing in accordance with their instructions (free). I followed these to the letter and BINGO, problem solved and no need to post.

P.P.

[Tarq57]

Here are a couple of links for background info/what other victims have experienced.(Chosen semi-randomly from a Google search)
MajorGeeks
(http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=1000800)
Techsupportguy
(http://forums.techguy.org/security/591837-please-help-trojan.html)
Grisoft (AVG), in addition to the popular antivirus, make a dedicated antispyware, which comes as a free trial resident, then reverts to a demand scanner. Pretty good.
Emsi soft make Asquared trojan remover, free and pay versions. Also pretty good.
Other good ones are Superantispyware and SpywareTerminator (not to be confused with spyware x terminator.)
Give one or two of those a shot, might fix it.
You may need to download specialist tools, as the posters in the forum links have to, such as smitrem, to deal to it, and if the free programs don't remove it, it would be best to post to one of those forums for help. The instructions provided to one user aren't valid for another with a similar problem, unless you're lucky. Other good removal forums include Castlecops, which is good enough that it was seriously attacked by hackers/crackers and almost taken out a while ago, Scotts newsletter forums, and Piriform (ccleaner) forums.
The point about disabling system restore is as a final cleaning action, to be done at the end of the clean up once everything is ok. So anything hiding in there gets deleted and can't then re-invade the OS if system restore needs to be used in the future. It is simply turned off, then on again.