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MY COMPUTER HAS BEEN SO MESSED UP IT IS DRIVING ME NUTS. I COULD NOT POST. CAN SOMEONE GIVE US STEP BY STEP DIRECTION ON HOW TO GET RID OF ALL THE MESS.

ducks, see reply #68... and then--

First off, if your PC is that bad, you may find it less frustrating to get the info and download all the stuff you need from another PC. And by all means, ask a power user for assistance, to help walk you through the steps. Bear in mind if- big if- you have backed up your critical data ( and who does that? ) it might be less time-consuming to simply format the HD and reinstall from clean CDs the OS and programs.

Print out all the info you find- there's too much to remember from reading a computer screen.

From my links in #66, get Ad-Aware from Lavasoft, Spybot Search and Destroy, and AVAST. Again, from my links, learn how to force Ad-Aware and Spybot to "perform a custom scan," and set them up to do that.

Reboot in Safe Mode- again, see my links, the info on this is in the SWI forums, on many posts, but in general, hit F8 repeatedly as your system boots. You must do this because the bad stuff loads during nomal bootup, and usually can't be deleted in normal mode. You also need to learn ( from the links ) how to set Windows Explorer ( this is NOT Internet Explorer-- this is the Explorer that comes bundled with your Operating System, that nobody uses much! ) to "see" all the files-- by default, it overlooks System files.

Run all three programs, one after the other, in safe mode, and let them clean out what they find-- and be advised you may have to do this ( in safe mode ) several times until they stop finding the junk in your system.

At this stage you may or may not have fixed the problem- but you will have found a pile of garbage that will help you get started in the right direction. You have to be patient, and persistent.

Now, join the SWI forum ( see my links ) and read carefully all the "pinned" instructions at the beginning of the forums-- you need to learn this so you can post your Hijack This! log in their forum in a format they can understand, and help you with your problems.

At this stage you will post your log there, and wait- they went from 5,000 members to over 30,000 in a few months and are badly overloaded, but if anyone can help you, they can.

It is possible that by reading their many posts, you can learn enough on your own to get a handle on the problems you are having- I did it that way.

And then, once you get your sytem clean- either by disinfecting, or a reformat & reinstall? Clone it to a spare hard drive once in a while-- HD's are cheap now, and that is the fastest way to recover from disaster. Your power user friend should know how to do this- but if not, ask me-- I think I can explain it well enough.

A few random thoughts-- first, quit using Internet Explorer-- you can't get rid of the damned thing, it's hooked into the OS-- but another browser like Firefox, Opera, or even an old free version of Netscape gets a lot less junk than IE... you must run an antivirus-- AVG is good and free, and uses little system resources, and they update daily. A firewall ( again, get a power user friend to help ) is just about mandatory nowadays-- and a hardware firewall is a lot better than a software firewall-- a home network can provide this, and some DSL modem have their own firewall.

And, of course, there is another route- Linux or a Mac!