From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

HijackThis: http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/index.html . It's powerful,
but easy to shoot yerself in the foot with, so backup what's important. I
have succesfully cleaned a few computers with hijacked browsers with
hijackthis, that neither spybot or ad-aware could clean.


Antti Kurenniemi

"Chris"  wrote in message news:42126074{at}w3.nls.net...
> Another good suggestion.  I *think* I turned off the automatic reboots
> (75% sure) but I'll double check that, too, when I get home, after I
> restore the backup.
>
> Also, any ideas for other spyware-detection/removal programs out there
> besides Ad-Aware and Spybot?
>
> Keep the ideas coming!
>
> /Chris
>
>
> Frank Haber wrote:
>> You can throw rotten fruit, and pardon me for asking, but you're
>> *absolutely*
>> sure there's no spyware lurking?  You have turned off "reboot on
>> bluescreen,"
>> yes, and looked up any stopcodes?
>>
>> Just to encourage you (not), and to show you how tetchy computers can be
>> in
>> the API area, let me tell you a story of some Win98 Sony desktops.  At
>> one
>> point I supported a lot of them.  They cam with 98-original.  An app
>> needed
>> 98SE.  98SE was notorious for shutdown problems on many machines, and I
>> produced a doozy.  The machines would reboot when shutdown, and became
>> totally
>> incapable of either a warm boot or a "reboot the GUI
only" cycle.  You
>> also
>> couldn't go to the "gaming" DOSbox, and any attempt to fiddle with
>> WINBOOT.INI
>> produced an instant hard hang.  There were two Microsoft patches for
>> this.
>> Neither worked.  There were many drastic registry patches.  I settled on
>> forcing ACPI (the hardware was there, but the enumeration/PCI ID was
>> broken,
>> and Sony, the b*stards, rarely does BIOS updates).  That worked about
>> half the
>> time, and the symptoms varied machine-machine.  On most of them, when
>> shutdown
>> failed, you hung at a flashing text cursor (BEYOND the "now
it's safe to
>> shut
>> down" screen).  CHKDSK *didn't* run on the next boot.  All was well
>> except for
>> the 2% of the time when CHKDSK did run.  I got called on every one of
>> these.
>>
>> Well, most of the machines were retired and the SIMMS stolen for use
>> elsewhere
>> (printers).  I recently had occasion to fire up a couple for a legacy
>> shoot.
>> I discovered something.  Running the machines with *two* sticks of
>> memory,
>> rather than the factory 128 on one SIMM, fixed the shutdown problems 99%.
>> Bus
>> termination?  My deodorant?  Go figure.
>>
>> Yes, I exonerate Microsoft on this one.  Yes, it's a hardware problem.
>> But I
>> also say, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we
abandon the good
>> old
>> reliable Big Orange Switch."  That doesn't rhyme.  Sue me.
>>

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5