helpp meeeeeeeeee

you gotta love 16 year-old sisters who are about as vigilant as a head of lettuce when it comes to internet security. i come home from uni for christmas to find that my sister has 20-odd trojans in her files and that my mum has received a phone bill for �300 because some hacker's gotten into the line and has made a gazillion international phone calls. hoo boy.

thing is, despite the hours of�mcafee virus updates and scanning and patching and firewalling�and googling and tearing my hair out, i'm still getting these blasted porn popups on the bloody thing and IE keeps shutting down and i have these bizarre hyperlinks everywhere linking to random search engines and omg waaahh. *puts head in hands and sobs exhaustedly* :D

can ANYONE out there help me? please? i diiiieeeeee. *bats eyelashes*

Reinstall. :)

*DELETES XP OMG*

punish some inanimate objects to calm down? :)

have you tried the yahoo toolbar? it kills popups and spyware.

I'm having a virus issue myself right now.� I had a bunch of 'em on my machine and I bought Norton and it fixed some of it. But then my computer toasted and was cycle-booting..never actually booting up. So it was dead for a month and finally a kind soul gave me XP to reinstall (I couldn't find my disc) which got the computer up and running again...Norton then found a virus (trojan)�still there, but quarantine failed, then delete failed. (So wtf do you do then?)...in the morning, computer was cycle-booting again. Reinstalled again and last I knew it's still functional but I have no idea when it'll die again. I gotta burn all my stuff to CD if it lets me and reformat the damn thing, probably.

Have you already tried spybot and ad aware?

Indeed, these are the only two to use. I also recommend using Mozilla Firefox instead of IE.

Lastly, use Grisoft AVG as your virus software. It's free, updated frequently and can scan your email and downloads.

OK, that pretty much kills anything I was gonna post. :-P

Between these two guys, they've covered just about all I would have suggested, and can think of to suggest right now. :)

OOOH, I do have something extra -- if you use Firefox, get the Adblock extension. can be configured to pretty effectively kill pop-ups Firefox's blocker misses, plus ads and things inside web pages, too.

-- Pauley

I'd suggest an exorcism. I have the materials and know the rite.

Yeah, I use AVG on all my machines.

i had the hyperlinks everywhere a little while ago.

here's the thread where we talked about it

also, majorgeeks.com has a really good step by step page that walks you through cleanign your computer.

Buy a mac.

I haven't had the need to run any virus software in about 15 years...