Not too long ago, I had to take several hours out of my date to rescue Internet Explorer from the clurtches of spyware. My homepage had been hihacked, my error pages re-routed to search engines, and even the most friendly of sites were loading me up with popup ads. Since this experience, I have since decided to make the move to Firefox, but there are still things that can be done to help rescue IE. One of them is CWShredder.
CWShredder is a small utility for removing CoolWebSearch (aka CoolWwwSearch, YouFindAll, White-Pages.ws and a dozen other names). More information on the CWS hijacker can be found at http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html. CWShredder will find and destroy all traces of the CoolWebSearch (CWS) hijacker on your system. This includes:
- Redirections to CoolWebSearch related pages
- Redirections when mistyping URLs
- Redirections when visiting Google
- Enormous IE slowdowns when typing
- IE start page/search page changing on reboot
- Sites in the IE Trusted Zone you didn’t add
- Popups in Google and Yahoo when searching
- Errors at startup mentioning WIN.INI or IEDLL.EXE
- Unable to change or see certain items in IE Options
- Unable to access IE Options at all
There are many places where you can download this utility, but MajorGeeks (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4086.html) is one of them. The utility was developed in the Netherlands, but was recently acquired by InterMute. You can view the press release here.
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