VX2 and Look2Me: Redux

The good news is that removing VX2 and Look2Me wasn\’t as hard as expected, the bad news is that something else called Suggestor was an SOB.

Turns out VX2 was set up in my System Restore folders (while this whole ordeal, which isn\’t over, was quite painful, the silver lining is that I\’ve learned a ton in a short time), which I discovered is not searchable by adware and virus scanners.  So I had to dump all my previous system restore points by turning the feature off.

As for Look2Me, I was able to download a program to remove that.  However, in the meantime this \”Suggestor\” adware popped up out of nowhere. 

As I mentioned before I had given up and decided to play the \”post my log file\” game on one of these forums (in particular the Lavasoft Forum where my Adware removal program was from).  After going overnight with no response, I decided to take the law into my own hands (Doug Llewelyn would not have been pleased).

So I downloaded one of the most mentioned tools called HijackThis.  It\’s a handly little took that scans your system to find what you are currently running, and what is going on in your registry, and gives you a nice little report.   This is the point where all the forums tell you \”DON\’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL WE TELL YOU TO!!!\”  Being a) stubborn, and 2) an armchair geek, I pushed forward by researching every…single… process…and … file in the log. 

So I learned a lot, and deleted a lot, but there were a couple of files that just wouldn\’t disappear.  To make a long story short (too late), I had to kill a running process, delete that file, then HijackThis could finally delete the files. 

About this time someone finally responded to my post telling me to run CCleaner.  I ignored this advice thinking I had solved everything on my own.  Sadly I was wrong.  I was (and still am) 99% of the way there, but I am still getting the occassional pop-up for WinAntiVirus Pro 2006; and I can\’t find anything that is causing them.  So I ran CCleaner, which found and deleted 650 MB of useless stuff (WOW!).  But even that hasn\’t solved the problem.  So now I\’m back playing the game where the guy on the forum has asked me to run a slew of other programs and post a fresh log file. 

Unfortunately, I don\’t think I have any other options…although I might be willing to deal with the occassional pop-up at this point.  Now I understand why some people just buy a new computer when this sort of thing happens.

Adware and Virus authors, I hope you enjoy your spot in hell!