So your neighbor calls you up frantic that he can't get onto the Internet. What do you do (other than not helping)? Download
NPE - Norton Power Eraser and go to his rescue. I had never used this product (or knew about it) until the other day. Using this was a quick an easy fix to a PC that was being hijacked by another "spyware removal" tool. It was the only thing that could get to the Internet, asking for money to "remove" infections that didn't exist. I hate these types of spyware infections. A less than savvy user could end up giving away personal information to clean their PC.
After starting the program up, I simply selected the scan type that I wanted and then NPE do the rest. The offending application was listed and removal options given. A few reboots later and I had my neighbors PC up and going again. I will caution you that you really need to pay attention to what is listed as a "bad" piece of software in the final list. On his machine, it was spot on. However on my personal machine I got a false positive when running it to get some screen shots for this article. To be honest, when in doubt you may want to just remove the things you are 100% sure of and then reboot to see if your issues have been resolved. If not, scan again and remove more. I was thrilled to get his issues resolved in less than an hour. I even took the add step of removing a non-functioning version of AVG and replacing it with
Microsoft Security Essentials (a free AV solution from Microsoft). Now he's up and running with some decent protection on his PC.
There are other commercial applications that can do this same sort of thing, but I'm all about open-source or freeware considering the economy (and personal choice). These types of applications are just as good or better as their commercial counterparts. Don't be afraid to try them, even if it's just to get you through a project or solution.
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