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.