IE7 Confused

[west lakes]

Having a bit of an odd problem at the moment
XP (SP3 - I know!!)
Normal web browser Firefox
AV McAfee

I noticed that the system has been slow for a couple of days and from time to time I'm getting pop up music and websites usually gaming sites. Looking in task manager I notice that iexplore.exe SYSTEM is running and taking up a lot of cpu usage.
Ran an AV scan, down loaded and ran spyware blaster, went into IE and cleared all caches, in processes I have ended the above process only for it to restart after a few seconds.
Earlier I had the message that IE has experienced a problem & needs to close.

Any suggestions?

[green granite]

Try FireFox or Opera.

[BOAC]

Not quite clear from your post why IE7 is running at all:), but maybe use 'hijack this' and have a look for nasties?

http://www.pprune.org/computer-internet-issues-troubleshooting/176718-hijack-analyser.html

[west lakes]

Not quite clear from your post why IE7 is running at all

I think that's the issue, neither am I, I haven't started it, I don't normally run it. The only evidence I can find that it is running is as detailed above. It doesn't appear in the applications tab on task manager.

[green granite]

You could try downloading Process explorer from Process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) and when you install it select the option to open using ctrl alt del. It's a much better tool than the MS one. to kill a process right click and select kill process.

[frostbite]

Some outside influence hasn't planted it in your Startup folder?

[west lakes]

Methinks Frostbite was right

Found the above file, another named realplay.exe and another Ms2b67gi
had mysteriously appeared on my hard drive on Sunday afternoon.
Was also getting warnings from AV about a Trojan (it had deleted some others)
deleted all the above from the hard drive and all seems (fingers crossed) OK

[green granite]

Realplay.exe is the systray program applet for real player which is a reasonable useless piece of software but not nasty, it's needed to play video clips from sites like the BBC (there are better alternitives)

What the other thing is I've no idea.

[west lakes]

Had a few trojan attacks this evening, AV is killing them!! Heightened the firewall now as well:ok:

The Ms2 one is definitely showing as a trojan on AV but needs killed in processes before manual removal.

The interesting one with the realplay was it was briefly appearing in processes everytime the iexplore process restarted. So I though I might as well get rid.

[call100]

Look here....
IEXPLORE.EXE, Prevx (http://www.prevx.com/filenames/4066405109152462892-X1/IEXPLORE.EXE.html)
Hope its helpful.

[west lakes]

Call100
Thanks for that, installed and run.
Looks as though my old fashioned detecting found all but 1 file - but it only takes one left to cause further problems:ok:

[call100]

Glad it helped....:ok: