Home Page Hijack in IE

[Paul in South Africa]

Has anyone come across a removal tool to stop the home page in IE6 being continually reset to my-finder. I have tried AdAware and Spybot Search and Destroy with no luck. Google hasn't shed any clarity on the issue either.

[edited by: engine at 4:38 pm (utc) on June 16, 2004]

[outrun]

This is part of coolwebsearch spyware, CwShredder in most cases will remove it, Im amazed why Adaware and Spybot search and Destroy doesn't target CoolwebSearch Spware.

regards,
Mark

[Marcia]

There was just a good discussion with a lot of information here

[webmasterworld.com...]

[2oddSox]

I had a similar problem the other night and couldn't figure out why Ad-Aware and S&D weren't fixing the problem. It transpired that whatever scumware I had overwrote the reference file for Ad-Aware to a ref file which was a year old, and stopped the program from updating a newer one. Hence it wasn't finding the culprit and fixing it. Manually installing the newest ref file did the trick. It might not be enough to fix your problem, but it's certainly something to keep an eye out for.

[raywood]

The spyware tools don't mess with your IE start page page, because they have no way to tell if it is what you want or it has been changed by a scumware.

The start page is listed in a registry key. There is also a key that controls the permision to change the start page setting. Some scumware will change your start page and disable the menu option to set it back to your choice. It's not too difficlt to fix. Look at [support.microsoft.com...]

[Paul in South Africa]

Thanks for the help. I finally got rid of it by manually editing the registry to remove every reference to the offending site. There were about 30 of them scattered through the registry.