spyware nightmare

I have been working on a spyware problem with a windows 2000 machine. I am at the end of my rope, and am out of Idea's. I have run adaware, pest patrol, spy bot, I've used msconfig to halt the system startup programs, I have ran hijack this, and manually removed the files listed, and then the registry entries. The spyware re-enters the entry after refreshing. I don't have any more ideas, and cant find any other ideas, besides wiping the whole thing, which would be a nightmare to back up 3 years worth of info. If you have any ideas, i'd be thrilled to hear them. Just for your info the trouble is mainly with ist toolbar, and the lycos searchbar. Thank you much.

disable system restore (never mind that... 2k doesn't have system restore... doh!)

try to run cswshreader. just be sure to update it before you run it.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/cwshredder.zip

I had this problem on my fathers PC a couple of nights ago.

adaware, spybot, norton av (all updated) couldn't remove it... but cswshreader did!

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Originally posted here by t3gilligan
I have been working on a spyware problem with a windows 2000 machine. I am at the end of my rope, and am out of Idea's. I have run adaware, pest patrol, spy bot, I've used msconfig to halt the system startup programs, I have ran hijack this, and manually removed the files listed, and then the registry entries. The spyware re-enters the entry after refreshing. I don't have any more ideas, and cant find any other ideas, besides wiping the whole thing, which would be a nightmare to back up 3 years worth of info. If you have any ideas, i'd be thrilled to hear them. Just for your info the trouble is mainly with ist toolbar, and the lycos searchbar. Thank you much.

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You might also want to try running Spybot and Adaware in safe mode. Sometimes those programs cannot delete something because its running. (booting into safe mode only allows the minimal system components to run)

Also: You did update the Spybot and Adaware definitions right?

Ok Thx, I'll give those ideas a try, and post back on the results

I tried both ideas, booting in safe mode, and running cws shredder. It seems to have worked beautifully. Thank you both

you might want to backup your data anyway if you feel it is valuable. I know it can be teadous, but it sucks to have to learn the hard way.

Good job on cleaning your system.

~Halv