OT: about:blank homepage hijacker..

[David E. Gervais]

FYI: I'm not a newb when it comes to compters. I did all the rededit, cwshredder etc, etc. whe the instructions say to boot in safe mode, I prefer to boot in DOS and delete the 'suspicious' files that way. I'm an old DOS school person.

It's deeper than this. When I launch my homepage with a shortcut, I check the internet settings and there is no sign of about:blank. I clean the registry and there are no instances of about:blank (I changed them all to point to the shrapnel forums login page.) When I launch IE the regular way that has it load the 'default' homepage,.. about:blank gets installed again.

as for the 'run' thing, I have nothing running in the background. That is a pet peve with me. it's the first thing I make a point to do. turn off all those useless 'boot at startup' things that you can simply acces when needed and are not needed to be running all the time.

even turning off and removing all these references to boot-up programs there are still more 'Processes' running than suits my fancy. but I don't know what processes are 'safe' to turn off.

Windows is a 'processing pig' there are too many things running that rarely get used in any of my normal sessions on my computer. One good example is the nVidia nvcpl that allways seems to manage to be running in the background. it basically is there if I want to activate the dual-display thing. I only have the one monitor so it's a useless waste of resources. e-mail to nVidia asking how to turn it off came back negative. they basically say turn off the 'nview' function in the display propeties but it is already 'Off'. So why does this boot at startup if it is not used? beats me. I even deleted the nvcpl.dll and it still managed to get back in the system.

No! it's not a virus, I have scanned my system and it comes out clean as a whistle. and this app does not seem to have adverse effects on my comp, it's just annoying that it boots and is not needed.

anyway, enough babbling, Cheers!

Edit: I'm now using Mozilla. I'll give it a good test run and see if everything stays this way.

[ July 04, 2004, 21:07: Message edited by: David E. Gervais ]