Winfixer (also known as "my daughter is a moron")
 

Apparently, my daughter clicked on something she shouldn't have and now we have "Winfixer" adware installed on my PC. It's a nasty little piece of shit the brings up popups and locks the browser(s) from time to time. I've run AdAware, Spybot, and Zone Alarms security suite against it. I've dropped the machine into safe mode and tried it again. No success, google brings up a variety of answers, the most common of which is a registry edit of nearly 100 lines. I'm not opposed to editing my registry, but 100 lines seems a bit much. Does anyone have any experience with this? Suggestions?

In a slightly more helpful vane. . . you might want to try Microsoft's Spyware Removal beta, yes I know it's MS, but the things is built off the CounterSpy database which is currently the most completely in the market. You can also try CounterSpy directly, but I'm not sure they've got a free client.

If that doesn't get rid of it, good luck my friend.

For adware, winfixer is a bad one.

Search for winfixer and vundofix.exe. Ignore fixes from more than a couple weeks ago as tools have changed. This one looks current:

http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index....d=289448&st=0&

there is also the windows recovery stuff. Might want to look into that

^^ Good tip. You could try refreshing a System Restore back a day or two.. it restores the registry and user directories, among other things. May or may not work..

I had a problem like this and used restore to go back a few days , the problem went away also. it's worth a try.

Restore wouldn't work, it said something had changed since the restore point and would not continue, probably winfixer, itself.

Vundofix and Hijackthis did the trick.

All of the gory details are at:
SpyWare Info

Thanks Cyrnel, that place wasn't coming up on my searches.

Good deal. That's an especially bad piece of adware.
As you might imagine, early victims were fairly bitter about the thing.

my originbal post got deleted and i got a one week vacation, but i would like to repost what i said ( in different words)

It is not right to call your daughter a moron, she only knows what you teach her

Thanks for the parenting advice. However:

She's 24, not 12.
She used IE, as opposed to Firefox against my explicit instructions.
She clicked on an obvious adware link and watched it download malware. (I was able to recreate this on a test box).
Worst of all, she did it on my machine, instead of the one I built for her.

I'll stand by my assessment.

i am not giving you advice. It may have been obvios to you it was a malware link, but was it to her? does she know why she should use firefox ( before this happened)

maybe she isnt a moron, and purpously infected yourcomputer...did you piss her off lately? (not really a point but a possible suggestion?)

MOST OF ALL

because she did something wrong dosent make her a moron

moron: stupid person; a dolt.
dolt: A stupid person; a dunce.
dunce: used to express a low opinion of someone's intelligence

moron: A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

If you go by the definition your daughter is mentally retarted or just

"one stupid dunce" moron dunce and dolt all seem to emply that they are comptly stupid not just in instances

edit* i have been waiting a week to say this