home page hijacking

[tony draper]

I have asked this before but I don't think I got any answers, a Yahoo homepage installed itself secretlyagin last night, so when I booted up this mornig insted odf my ISP homepage I got a Yahoo homepage.
Now I know how to get rid of this, I go to internet opitions and a the top is a box that say homepages, I use the back space button to remove the yahoo url from the box and just type in my isp homepage URL the click on apply, and reboot, this is not difficult I know but it gets on my tits that someone can install this on my machine.
Right the question is how do I delete all the alternative Home pages from internet options?, there are seemingly dozens of the bloody things, Yahoo, MSN, some norty ones(no idea how they got there) and other ones I have not a clue about.
I have emptied the cache , deleted all offline contents, cleared the history but these bloody things are still there, there does not seem to be a obvious way to delete them??.
Incidently the only way they seem to show up is when I start to type the homepage URL and I have typed www. a long list of homepages appear in that space.
There must be some way of getting rid of these with bloody things without deleting IE6 and reloading it.
Driving me batty it is.

[BRL]

Hi Tony, do you have ADaware on your machine? If not, do a search for it here, its pretty good to have. It might not stop it from happening to be honest but it is worth a try. Good luck :)

[Dibble&Grub]

Hi Tony,
Big Red is right about adaware. Here is a link to read.

HiJaacked Homepage (http://www.cyberwalker.net/columns/oct02/241002.html)

D&G

[Synthetic]

Some anti-virus software (I use norton) will detect the browser hijack routines as virusses and stop them. This means not having to have something else running as well

[tony draper]

Thanks peeps, I know there are utilities to prevent this happening again, but I want to know how to delete the ones I have been lumbered with already?.
As I said this cannot be a unique problem, surerly there is a way of deleting all the URL stored in the internet options , homepage box without deleting internet explora or formating my harddisc.
again thanks for the help peeps .:confused:

[Xacto]

Hello Tony,

Haven't tried REGSVR32 URLMON.dll but the following has worked for me. As far as I can figure the answer lies with the Index.dat files within the Windows Temporary Internet, History and Cookies folders. Despite using Internet Options to delete your browsing history these index files still retain info on your browsing activity. Check their properties and you will find the file size is several Mb depending on your activity. Windows won’t let you delete them, the only way it can be done is in real DOS mode.

The usual caveats apply, ALL your cookies and cache files will be deleted.
Use a boot disk to boot to real DOS mode. Change to the C prompt and type the following—–

C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV
CD WINDOWS
DELTREE/Y HISTORY
DELTREE/Y TEMPOR~1
DELTREE/Y COOKIES

(the BB has interpreted colon backslash as a smilie!)

Each delete may take some time if your files are large. Reboot to Windows and you’ll find these files have been recreated, but now if you check the size of the Index.dat files, they’re only a few Kb. Check Internet Options and you should find that the drop down list of URLs has disappeared. It will of course build up again as you continue browsing. I use this procedure on a regular basis just to clean everything out.

You might like to visit this site before trying anything.
http://www.f**kmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml
You’ll have to cut and paste the URL and use your imagination to substitute for the **! My thanks to the PPRuner who originally posted this link, can’t remember who or where.
Hope this works for you.

Regards,
Xacto.