So i felt like i should tell you guys the story of the past few hours. it's been lots of "fun" but i discovered some cool things along the way.
so it started with me reinstalling the 8800gtx drivers that alienware provided me. After i restarted i noticed some unusual behavior. my comp was slow as hell. so i checked the processes and there was a winlogon.exe using FIFTY percent of my processor. logically i didn't like that so i tried to end it, no such luck.
i scoured the interweb forums until i spied a forum that specialized in spyware removal for idiots like me. they had several steps i was to take before posting a thread to be sure what my problem was. step 1 was to scan my computer with housecall from Trend Micro. after i scanned my computer and tried to delete all the files, i noticed that one was not going away. AskPBar.DLL. it is used by ask.com i think and is highly associated with spyware. so i looked online for a way to remove it and found a little program called unhackme.
so i installed unhackme and performed my scan. not only did unhack me find and remove askpbar.dll, but it also found rocketdock, alienguise, my OSD controller, and itself, and tried to remove all of them. it also removed the activation i had for windows, so i have to reactivate. but the most amazing thing it found was winlogon. it actually found what was causing my problem in the first place.
this was all my fault, since i told it to remove those things rather then choosing what i wanted gone. But, lo and behold, it actually worked. it didn't touch alienguise or OSD, i went back and told it not to.
I still need to reactivate windows, but now winlogon is gone, askpbar.dll is gone, and my comp is running fine again.
this program is awesome, and I'd recommend it to any experienced user.
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and just in case anyone was wondering, here is the site that helped me in the first place.
http://www.ozzu.com/
unhack me
Discussion in 'Security and Anti-Virus Software' started by stirfriedsushi, Aug 3, 2008.