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jmarinara
10-15-2007, 03:14 PM
Ok so I'm helping a friend fix his computer after he completely screwed it up not keeping an eye on spyware, viruses and other such nefarious software on the internet. He put his trust into his ISP's free software to protect against this stuff, which of course is usually a bad idea. He downloaded the dreaded Wild Tangent gaming stuff and now has two problems.

1. We can't access control panel or any other part of Windows XP home that requires admin privileges. This is a particular problem because we would like to uninstall the useless software the ISP gave him and install zone alarm.

2. We have no access to anything on the net. He is using IE6 (I hope to talk him into Firefox) and it refuses to load any page. It simply says it is accessing an IP number, then shows a blank screen and says it's done. When we attempted to download Zone Alarm, it would start the download wizard (from Zone Alarm) but wouldn't move.

I have some theories, and am scheduled to go back to his house to try and fix this later. I would like to go back with more than just theories, so I thought I'd throw this out to the more experienced out there.

Any help would be much appreciated. :)

Paul Komski
10-15-2007, 09:09 PM
Logging in as Admin in Safe Mode will let you do a lot - but you wont have networking capabilities.

mjc
10-15-2007, 10:49 PM
Wild Tangent is mild compared to some of the stuff floating around now. I doubt that it is the worst problem on there.

HijackThis (http://www.download.com/HijackThis/3000-8022_4-10379544.html) can be run from a USB drive/flash disk. I would advise running it and posting the log.

For a 'second opinion' I would also recommend running Portable Clamwin (http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/clamwin_portable). In fact, the parent site for Portable Clamwin has several tools that may be helpful, including a portable FireFox.