Forum Moderators: phranque
One of them messed up my IE Homepage settings and kept on adding itself to my default homepage address even after I removed it tons of times. Then I went to the domain and clicked on their "contact us" page which provided me with a tool called as "cleaner.exe" and gave me the ability to remove their url from my start page settings. I was reluctant to use it, but I had no option as I played in vain with the registry. I downloaded that soft, cleaned up, and everything worked fine until I did a search on Google.
While I was searching in Google, I found tons of cloaking spam in the results. Several respectable sites had all information, including title & body indexed perfectly, but the url pointed to spam sites which used the keywords originally used to search in google. Several of those spammy sites are with .ws extension or an IP address.
I tried all major keywords and most of the respected and top sites were affected with this problem.
I thought it was a problem with Google, but after doing a search from a different computer, I found out that the results were perfect as seen from that computer. So the above mentioned scumware messed up the google results. Later after doing a search on google groups i found out that many users faced a similar problem, but had no clue what was the origin of the problem.
Just a heads-up for anyone who may see something similar. i also found some sites which provide instructions on its removal
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html
http://dutch.hopto.org/index.php?v=1&weblog=355
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1225099,00.asp
http://www.google.com/search?q=coolwebsearch&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1
Seems like this is old news, but its spreading.
[Added: Another problem i am facing is with the Windows Explorer. Whenever I browse windows explorer and select any ".htm*" file it encounters an error and all the explorer windows shut down. I am certain that scumware/virus has also managed to corrupt IE/explorer as every other file works fine except .htm* files when I browse from the explorer]
[small][b]Every problem mentioned above was solved and my computer is back into action after I cleaned up my pc with the [url=http://www.merijn.org/files/CWShredder.exe]CWshredder[/url][/b][/small]
No problem since.
G001
