My esteemed bro has installed a piece of parasitic software on my PC called Gain Gator that fires pop-up adds at me.

It isn't present in the Windows XP add/remove program section and I've deleted the directory that the software appeared to be installed in to no avail.

I've tried a couple of freeware pop-up 'killers' but these aren’t effective.

Can anyone suggest a method to get rid of this odious software to a simple student pilot like me?

Dont know much about xp but its prolly in the registry somewhere, they should make stuff like that illegal, I had a recovery utillity on mine,my fault i broke me own rule putting it on, it would not let me change any setting, when I went to delete it it said I needed a pass word to delete, which i did not have, it was a demo.Had a hell of a job getting shot of it, it was buried so deep.sorry about the length of this sentance but the return key just went tits up on me keyboard :(

Gain Gator is atached to a DivX 5 codec that includes a "free" avi viewer. Look for this avi player in control panel, add, remove programs etc..... Also check your startup folder.

Nasty bit of kit. Took me days to remove from a friends computer.

Cheers, :cool:

try www.lavasoft.de for a program called adaware. It will scan the drive for any of these parasitic programs and you can then tell it which ones you wish to make disappear from the system

Gator also can load a spyware program called trickler which tries to connect to the net when you are on line and down load yet another spyware program.

If you are VERY careful and are happy with modifying the registry. from the start button click on Run and enter Regedit.
From the folder tree browse to
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Run

This will list all the programs that run when you start windows.

If you see fsg.exe this is the trickler program. delete the whole entry for that line.

BE CAREFUL and don't go killing every program just because you dont know what it does. Most well behaved programs will uninstall themselves from here. It is just the #$@<hidden>@<hidden> programs that hide away that you need to kill.

Do a Google search on Gator :mad: bad news

MAx

FLYBHX, I tried to get rid of the GAIN stuff with Ad-Aware. It finds it and you can check the box to dump it but then Ad-Aware tells you that it cannot get rid of it.
This is annoying and I am not computer literate enough to go poking around without pretty specific instructions.:mad:

My lovely kids installed a real beut called comet curser. I have tried every thing and it won't die.........and now it seems they got me a virus called B_magistr something or other and I,m having a bugga of a job getting rid of that too.

thanks guys, managed to get rid w/Adaware.

innuendo: I had the same problem as you first time around, the trick is to manually stop GMT.exe running in the background using the crl+alt+del function prior to running Adaware.

I am not sure if I have managed to get rid of GAIN/Gator or just swept it under the rug. What I did was use the System Reset (using XP Home) to a date that I was sure was previous to having GAIN. I was then left with an entry in my program list that referred only to the GAIN website. Ad-Aware found this and deleted it without a problem that I am aware of and the program does seem to be removed. Perhaps someone more knowlegable can tell me if I am correct or if I have just swept the problem under the rug.:confused:

I forgot to mention a web site I found that was not complimentary about the GAIN people.
http://www.aluminumstudios.com/spyware/