Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Ars had a review of Spyware removal tools last week or so that was mentioned here. It was a good article but I wanted to point out that it did not mention Bazooka.

I boot into Windows at home in order to play games and use Outlook through the VPN for work. Other than that I dont use it, and since I dont work from home that often and am not a hard code gamer (well until I discovered KOTOR I wasnt ;)) I dont really use it that much. In addition I never install any crap, I have 3 things in my taskbar and thats because I show the volume control, show the power control and show the network icon when active. I just dont install *any* third party thingys.

Yet today, even with limited and vigilant use of Windows, I managed to get some MEGASEARCH toolbar crap in IE (have to use IE for one of the apps I work on, nice). So I found Bazooka and ran it. Had about 6 spware crap type things! WebRebates, MultiMPP, ShopAtHomeAgent, this Megasearch thing and a few others. WTF!?!

Somehow even I managed to get my Windows clustered up and didnt even realize it (and if Megasearch hadnt actually modified the top of IE I would not have noticed). Insanity man, I must have visited a site that installed these, or clicked something, or who knows what, at some point, but its just insane how easy it is to get Windows corrupted (whether the fault of Windows or not being another matter, its easy to get all this crap no matter where fault lies).

Its also crazy how many hoops you have to go through to remove this stuff. It makes sense that these clowns that make this spyware crap would make it difficult to remove and try all sorts of specious bullshit like tricky names, tricky locations and so on, but its still just silly how much you have to do to remove it. I had to boot in safe mode, unregister dlls, edit a bunch of registry stuff, rename files, reboot, delete files, reboot again, stop processes then delete some more files, etc.

Bazooka, which is great, and free (donations accepted), had detailed pages on each of the ailments my machine had and gave me all the cumbersome steps. The moral of this story, if you use Windows, then keep Bazooka handy (and donate).]

(And sidebar, my wife noticed all the grumbling and asked what was up, I told her about the spyware crapola and asked if she had installed anything for "shop at home" or whatever. She pointed at an iMac next to my PC and said "I use this one" and didnt even realize the wisdom ;).)