Night of the Blue Screen of Death (or CoolWWWSearch should die)

This latest CoolWWWSearch (and other lame spyware) battle has been hard fought. After much manuvering in safe mode and DOS, installing and using various tools the Windows ME machine is finally running a virus scan. Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-aware, Merijn's CWS Shredder and a few other arcane devices seem to have jointly reached a state of 'healed'. We'll see. On a vudu scale, 4 out of a possible 5 chickens were killed over this one. It may just be paranoia, but after Norton's finishes this scan more than likely I'll install AVG and run it one time just to put my mind at ease. It has done all the Windows Critical Updates finally. The BSODs have retreated for now.

This machine had Real Player and Webshots. These are two of my least favorite things you can do to a computer. Real Player has been associated with various spyware/adware down through the years and used to be extremely hard to remove from a system. Sorta like AOL, it never really went away. Webshots is a resource hog. Both of these programs are removed now. If anyone has more clarification, please contact and set me straight.

It's a Compaq Duron 750 with 128 megs o' RAM, 20gigs of hard drive and used every day, all day in an office environment. The user is savvy and thought the updates were being done. Thanks to the spyware jerks, misrepresentation of completed updates misled everyone. Honestly folks, it's time to find the location of the CWS creeps and kick their sorry asses. Wait, they'd probably enjoy that so instead get in touch with your local representatives and senators and express the need to enact laws that will put these people IN JAIL!!!!

Now that this episode is drawing to a close, there is another CWS infection waiting in the wings. This PC is a Windows 98SE flavor and it will probably take as much time to 'Frankenstein' as this last one. You never know. Please contact me if you need a more detailed description of the procedures used and mistakes made in removing this garbage. Hopefully, I'll have a better "map" after the next one. Also, anyone with input about 2000 and XP machines, please use the comments at least. The Cybersouth email addy is GMAIL so please feel secure in writing. Talking and sharing will help us all.

Beagle and Red Magnet team, thanks for all the aid and info. Y'all are da' bomb!

"Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

EDIT: 5:45am - Remember that old saying, "Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean that someone is NOT after you."?????? Well AVG found 4 infected files blessed with Trojan Downloader.Agent that an up to date Norton's missed. Thought this might be of interest...