Spyware City

[Cade Foster]

A cute girl recently dumped her computer on me with a blush and a smile and so as an acquintance of her father I agreed to fix it for a few bucks, something i've been doing for a while now. the system is as follows:

XP Pro, AMD 1ghz

Spyfighter, the fake antispyware spyware, was amongst the plethora of crap I found on it and so I installed and ran the following:

Spybot search and destroy
eidows anti-spyware
spyware blaster
Ad aware SE Personal
Spyware Doctor
Sysinternals Autoruns
Hijack This
Rootkit Revealer
Smitfraudfix

However there r two things I cannot seem to fix

1. a "Bearshare" entry in Spybot search and destroy that requires a restart to fix, but doesn't after restart
2. A Norton systemworks/ Antivirus entry in add remove programs that will not delete

Needless to say I've deleted the program folders for each, which aside from a few dlls, were lacking the actual programs themselves.

I guess what Im after is a way to check that the winxp pro system folders are intact and unharmed and a way to disable startup programs other than MSconfig, i.e a registry sweep of some sort..thnx for any help

[BluesMan1]

There is 2 programs that i am using all the time.

The first one is RegScrubXP that can be found here: http://www.sofotex.com/RegScrubXP-download_L7528.html

the other one is CCleaner here: http://www.ccleaner.com/

The first one is a registry cleaner which is really safe and easy to use. The other one is a crap cleaner which keeps my computer clean.


Now to remove unwanted entries in Add Remove i found this: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/AddRemove.htm

and

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/110/

Hope this help

[Cade Foster]

Excellent advice Bluesman, thnx alot - removed the registry keys manually then ran RegScrubXP, much appreciated

[BluesMan1]

You don't really need to remove any key manually. RegScrubXP will find all keys that are unused and will remove them for you.

It is very dangerous to remove keys manually unless you really know what you do but if you are confortable with it you can delete some of them of course

Good Luck