What resets a Home Page?

[18greens]

My PC changes the Home Page to some generic search engine every time I exit Explorer.

Each time I go back in there it is, I change the Home page to blank but the next time I open it the search engine has reappeared.

Any ideas why this happens and where this piece of code is sitting. Its windows 2000 IE6 btw.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

18greens,

Malware and some viruses do that. Lets do two things to check out your system:

[list=1]
Run Trend Micro's HouseCall (http://housecall.trendmicro.com)
Download, Install and Run LavaSoft's Ad-Aware (http://lavasoft.element5.com/software/adaware/)
[/list=1]

Lets see what those two programs find.

Take Care,

Richard

[sprocket]

There is some insidious malware around that never used to be.

If the above tried and true suggestions fail to fix your problem, then go here Tech Support (http://forums.techguy.org/help/) ... and read the "Security" sub-forum. Have a read of some of the posts there or do a search.

A malware called Cool Web Search has been doing the rounds lately and (apparently) can only be removed using a specific tool called Cool Web Shredder. The malware is continually being changed to avoid the fixes for it, so the CWS remover is constantly being updated. All the info is in the above link.

[bughunta]

My recent experiences in the last few weeks have led me to believe that there is a very large increase in the amount of variants of CoolWebSearch, a browser hijacker. I've seen this appear on PC's loads of time, and it was just a case of running Spy Bot and/or Ad-Aware to remove it. However, I think that's changing fast, and this week alone (it's only Tuesday!) I've had to use CWShredder (http://www.merijn.org/cwschronicles.html) to get rid of some pretty dreadful homepage hijackers on 3 different pc's, after the 2 previous mentioned anti-spyware tools failed to get rid of it.

bug

[Bre901]

Make one good resolution for 2004 : Give up using Internet Exploder ! :yuk:

Try Opera (http://www.opera.com) or Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/).

You will have much more control on cookies, popups and privacy

[phnuff]

Opera is great however I do find I need an IE or Netscape copy as well as a number of sites including on-line banking does not work with Opera.

Has anyone any experience on Mozilla and what doesnt work on it?

[Keef]

I use Mozilla for 95% of my browsing. It's excellent. The only snag is that it uses "proper"HTML and doesn't implement the non-standard MS HTML as used in IE.

So it won't work on some websites. Mostly, I just don't visit those. For the couple that are non-standard and that I do need, I keep a copy of MSIE uniquely for them.

I've never had a virus or a nasty infect my PC through Mozilla.

[FJJP]

18Greens, what progress?

FJJP

[18greens]

Thanks for the replies. I ran the Trend software which got rid of it then it came back.

I'm just about to try CWShredder.

CWShredder worked fine!!

[goates]

Mozilla/Netscape, and possibly Opera (I haven't used it much), also have the benefit of not supporting ActiveX which is one method that malware use to get onto your computer. This Microsoft technology is great for making fancy sites, but I can do without it and haven't found many sites that absolutely require it. The only sites that I use IE for are the Windows and Office Update sites and some hardware vendor sites that have similar online update programs.

goates