Bill,
Are you sure you are really getting rid of it? If it's coming from a specific website the first thing to do is put in a HOSTS entry that will stop your computer from even seeing that website anymore. For example gator was one of the first things I stopped:
127.0.0.1 www.gator.com
This basically tells the computer that
www.gator.com resolves to your own machine and thus won't try to get it from the internet.
You can look through your browser cache and sort by LastAccessed and/or URL to find the sites you want to block entirely.
In IE use Tools/Manage Add-Ons and disable anything you don't explicitly want.
Look in your StartUp to make sure nothing is set to run there you don't want.
Use RegEdit to make sure crud isn't attached to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx
Look for newly created folders in your Program Files and Windows Directories. If you find a bad EXE in there delete it, if you can't delete it rename the directory so that the launching code can't find itself the next time you boot.
As you prune the folders and registry keys do a FIND in regedit for unique parts of the name to make sure you get it every place.
Use taskman to terminate the executeables. A lot of them have started relaunching themselves on shutdown so you may not be able to kill them completely. The above renames help in tis regard.
>In the last few weeks my spyware finders (spybot, ad-aware, and Earthlink's spyware blocker) keep finding the same spyware on my computer every day. I keep removing them, but the next day they're back.
>
>Can someone point me to a place where I can learn about how spyware is getting onto my computer, so maybe I can catch it, or at least learn what I'm doing that's bringing it back so I can quit doing it.
