A while back I must have wandered into a bad, bad site. I was browsing on FireFox, checking some old bookmarks when I noticed a graphics tips site acted odd and locked up (it was also no longer what the title in my bookmarks suggested). FireFox appeared to lock up, I killed it and had to take care of something else. While I know the story is always “I didn’t install anything”, I can honestly say that all I did was go to the site which was almost immediately followed by the lockup.

Regardless, a bit later I heard talking coming from my office.  I at first thought I’d lost my mind and my dogs were having a conversation.  Luckily (or maybe not) I found there were multiple Internet Explorer 7 windows opened and I saw tasks in the system tray running and realized I got hit with something while, I assume, on that page.   I did a clean up with several adware apps, Windows Defender and did a full virus scan which gave me multiple references in my registry and files on my drive (most residing in Windows, System32 or my temp folder). I deleted the files, allowed the programs to do the cleaning process of the registry in addition to me removing a few items listed in both the local user and local machine run keys and rebooted. On reboot, my Anti-Virus reported additional files. I rebooted into safe mode (which I should have done to begin with) and did additional cleaning which rendered little additional finds.   I rebooted again and things seemed to be OK until I attempted to launch IE7 for something (which I don’t use that much). I received the message Windows cannot find ‘C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe’.   When I right clicked on the icon, it took me to the path and selected the file, so it was still intact.

A few things I tried: Restoring IE default settings, copying the Internet Explorer folder from a working XP system (thinking iexplore.exe or a dll may have been corrupted or compromised), updating to IE8, uninstalling IE7 from Add/Remove programs and reinstalling, downloading IE7 again and allowed automatic update (which still worked) to install patches and when none of this rendered results, I cursed and screamed loudly at my PC but for some reason this too didn’t resolve the issue.

I had quit worrying about it, for the most part, since it’s the system I use as a media player, storage and a utility PC for backups, etc. and don’t really browse on it.  But it was always there laughing at me, pointing at me and making fun of me!!   So tonight I painted my face, stared the monitor down and said “Prepare for war”….