Hi Cypher
Well – it’s been 2 days and NO SPAM emails!! Thank you very much!!!! I really appreciate your help cleaning this up. My laptop appears to be working properly again. What a relief.
A couple of final items/questions:
On the Winpatrol issue, I clicked yes as suggested and have had no recurrence of the irritating popup.
On the globeandmail home page issue – was still a problem on Thursday but seemed to clear itself up on its own yesterday. Still not clear what was happening there, but since its gone away I won’t worry about it.
When we ran the kaspersky scan on Wednesday it identified:
Threats found: 1
Infected objects found: 2
Suspicious objects found: 0
Scan duration: 04:15:56
File name / Threat / Threats count
C:\Program Files\HP Games\Wheel of Fortune\Wheel of Fortune-WT.exe Infected: Trojan-Mailfinder.Win32.Blen.ys 1
C:\SwSetup\HPGame\games\wheeloffortune-setup.exe Infected: Trojan-Mailfinder.Win32.Blen.ys 1
You then said:
What the kaspersky scan found is not a problem.
I’m bringing this one up again for the following reason – the laptop is an HP machine. There has always been a weekly check (runs on Mondays). Over the last couple of weeks, on more than one occasion (and not necessarily on Monday) it identified that a software update for the Realtek High-Definition Audio was suggested (as routine). I accepted it, but the update has not been successful to-date.
So I’m just wondering if these items may be related.
Finally, I took a look at the Malware Removal - Downloads Page.
One of the suggested items is the mvps Hosts program. I have been attempting to follow the Vista instructions
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hostsvista.htmbut having no success:
In the 1st option (sendto), I get to “Next: Right-click in the right pane and select: New > shortcut , but then there is no “next dialogue box”. So I get stuck here.
When I try the ‘Updating the HOSTS file via "Elevated" Command Prompt” option, every time I attempt to save the cmd-admin.reg file, it only allows me to save as a text file – so don’t get the option to “right-click and select: Merge (Ok the prompt) ... no need to reboot.”
While I’m certainly not a techie, I am a fairly sophisticated user and am getting a tad frustrated with my inability to perform this (apparently simple) task.
What am I missing here?
Thanks once again for your assistance Cypher