[thelist] odd IE worm or something..

[James Parsons]

Tom puzzles...

>Hi folks,
>
>I have a strange thing happening with my IE on winXP. I've run
>ad-aware and a full virus scan which has turned up nothing.
>
>You can see a screen shot here:
>
>http://www.pixelmech.com/review/ieThing.gif
>
>What happens is that a IE window spawns of *its own accord.* When it
>happens, I don't know, but in this case nothing was running. I come
>back and there it is. You cannot navigate to the window at all, there
>is no window per se. The window title seems to be the "==" part. I
>can easily alt-F4 and close it or close it in the task window.
>
>It does NOT show up when you alt-tab through open apps.
>
>Anyone have an idea how I can find out/remove this?
>
>Tom


Oddly, we're seeing the same thing on a brand new XP system one of my
clients here in town just recently put online. It seems to gotten infected
with something already before I was able to get up there and disabled
ActiveX and install Ad-Aware along with Spybot Search & Destroy. I live in
a small town here in Iowa, and while I'm primarily a web designer/content
manager and run a small web hosting system, I often get called by the
locals when they run into things they can't figure out. Even though I only
use Macs and run the servers on Linux & Apache, I guess I'm the closest
thing we've got to a general system troubleshooter around here, although
I'm not really a Windows expert and do not intend to become one.

Anyway, I've updated anti-virus apps on the system in question. Plus, also,
installed and run Ad-Aware, http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/,
and Spybot Search & Destroy, http://www.safer-networking.org/ (which is the
better of the two, I think), but we don't seem to be getting rid of these
annoying pop-ups. So, either it's something else or we're just seeing some
new hijacker apps that nobody's caught up with yet. For sure, I think
anybody running Windows and Internet Explorer accessing the public Web
needs to disable ActiveX across the board.


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