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Yesterday I found myself engaged in a fight to the death with Spyware and Adware infecting The Reverend’s machine. It threw me right out of my PM tasks, and pushed me into a prolonged struggle with software infecting my machines. It almost got the better of me.

My Trend Micro virus checker/firewall didn’t touch this stuff – I needed better tools.

Fortunately, the local Philadelphia Inquirer had run an article in the Tech section about tools for cleaning out Adware/Spyware just last week. I ran down to the garage and rummaged thru the recycle, and there it was – a description of Spybot and Ad-Aware, and links to downloads!

The article described Spybot and Ad-Aware, and provided a link to a site dedicated to helping folks in my situation. Here is the link:

http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/unwanted.htm

There is a wealth of tips here, plus links for downloads. Beware, though: at least one of these infections can “spoof” the Spybot site so that it appears to be unavailable. Both Spybot and Ad-Aware are freeware, and available on sites like www.download.com.

But I’m not yet convinced. I go into Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel, and find 4 or 5 programs with names like Win Tools, Searchware, and Win BI. I delete them, and I’m feeling good. Reboot, and up pops a flicker of a dialog box during boot-up. I check ctrl-alt-delete for the applications running on this mature win 98 laptop, and find two copies of Rundll32 running (a MS utility that allows a .dll to run as an app).

I run Regedit –navigate down to the RUN section of Windows in the Local_Machine, and see several entries running stuff from Windows/temp, and other suspicious places.

Now I’m getting worried.