Unwanted permanent home page

A website as set an unwanted permanent homepage that needs to be removed

[Stephen Tiller]

Hi Guys

I am asking this question on behalf of my father, but have had this happen to myself once before and was able to resolve it myself. I don't want to click on the url my father has sent me as I am at work and not too sure If I can remember how to remove it.

He has gone to a website and this website has installed itself as his permanent home page. I know it does this by editing the registry, but I can't remember where to look to remove the affecting code. Does the unwanted editing affect the same place in the registry or can it go in different areas. I have provided the URL below, I am not sure if I am allowed to do this but if a moderator has to remove the url perhaps he could tell me how to get the homepage removed.

Look forward to your replies

<snip>

Steve

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:16 am (utc) on July 3, 2003]

[Paul in South Africa]

Assuming you are using IE go to Tools>Internet Options and under the General tab change the home page setting.

[Skylo]

Hi Steve and welcome.

I had this same problem about a year ago. I was surfing for cracks, found what I was looking for and closed IE. The following day turned on my computer and opened IE. It went to a very weird page with a very strange url. So while perplexed and staring blankly at my screen a little search box with no name generated from my task bar and asked me to enter a search term. This little thing did not even have a name.......dodgy stuff I thought.
I ran Ad-aware deleted a huge amount of stuff that it picked up, restarted my PC and presto it was better except my home page was now Google.com when it had been webmasterworld before hand:)

So I would recommend running ad-aware if you have it or any similar program of the sort

Hoped that helped a bit

<added> Forgot to say that going into Tools>internet options did nothing for me and it was a quick answer to a crappy problem. So unless Pauls post helps then run ad-aware</added>

[edited by: Skylo at 10:17 am (utc) on July 3, 2003]

[Brett_Tabke]

whew, lets not post the url please ;-) eg: I found this thread through stickymail where several people had been snagged by the url.

[Skylo]

Good Call Brett;-)

[universalis]

In answer to the question - don't touch the registry just yet. Download Spybot Search and Destroy [download.com.com] and use it to clean up any spyware and adware on your machine. Then right-click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop (don't open it yet) and select properties. Change the Home Page to whatever you want, then click on Delete cookies, then Delete files (including offline items) and clear history.

If that doesn't work, post again and someone will help with cleaning the registry.

[Stephen Tiller]

Sorry about the URL Brett. Hand well and truly smacked (and still stinging!)

Thanks for the replies. I didn't know about these programs and they are very useful.

I actually wanted to know which key it locks itself into in the Registry. For example;

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{2179C5D3-EBFF-11CF-B6FD-00AA00B4E220}

Steve