How do you remove COOLWEBSEARCH??

[Muffinman]

Hey. It's 4:40 in the morning right now. I have to be at work in, like, 3 hours. I am trying to remove this spyware crap from my computer. Jeremy Mirken (I think?) posted a topic about this in general footbag (or another forum?) a while ago. About the homepage of his internet explorer being changed to res://somethingsomething. I had the same problem.

Now I'm trying to actually get rid of this crap. I've scanned with Adaware 6.0 and Spybot (though I have a version that won't remove for you, just tells you what you have). I've just downloaded and scanned with CWShredder and Spy Sweeper -- two removal programs I found from a search for "remove coolwebsearch", which could very well be spyware themselves. I am not really computer-literate enough to be figuring this out alone.

Does anybody know what to do to get rid of whatever it is that's on mycomputer? Spy Sweeper actually recognizes the homepage change every time I open Windows Explorer, but it says that I'm clean.

Help please

[kaos]

Can you give a bit more details on your system as well as the symptoms?
Stuff like your OS (do you have any service packs installed? etc.). Also which page do you get redirected to? Does anything else go weird in IE? (stuff like hyperlinks changing targets etc?)


CWShredder seems to be the program to use to remove COOLWEBSEARCH. I doubt that it is malware in itself, since the author have written other utilities aswell that is widely used in spyware removal.

When you scan with CWShredder, make sure that all browser windows are closed, as well as all Windows Explorer windows/folders. In fact, make sure that only the necessary processes are running. (Use the task manager (CTRL-ALT-Del), go to the processes tab, and end all the processes that you don't know what they do. (If its a system critical process, windows will not allow you to end it, so don't worry about that, or only end the ones thats running as your user name (you probably won't need anything more that explorer.exe to run))).

After that, run CWShredder again (making sure you have the absolute latest version).


The problem with CWS is that there are so many variants, and each one removal differs from the next. Check out these sites:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/CoolWebSearch.html
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/cws/


I do think however that you should consider changing your browser (I know this have been said countless times in the past).

[Whatsfootbag?]

chan i had that same thing but it got worse...some big ass virus/spy ware thing got in and started taking over my desktop..it mad emy backgr\ound some advertisement for this spyware blocker when its self was a serious case of spyware...so yea when i'd end the IE processes that it was using,my entire desktop woudl go blank and i'd have to restart only to find it still there.sadly i had to reformatt and reinstall XP and now she's back to normal which is still sucky..try your best to save it but in the end, reformatting sucks

[Muffinman]

Yeah, I'm trying out Opera right now (some people said it was a better alternative). I am running Windows XP. I don't really know much, like what a service pack is. About the page I get redirected to in IE -- Chris Pinkus said in that older post (started by Jeremy M) that it is a file that the spyware is running from my harddrive, hence the res:// or whatever. It's just a page that looks like a search engine with lists of "most popular searches" and stuff. I DO get random word links, too, that's something else I forgot to mention. I guess I didn't put together that it was related to the spyware. I made sure everything was closed when I ran CWShredder -- but I will try to close things in my task manager and try again later. Thanks for the help.

Oh, and one more thing. I just turned on my computer for the first time since installing Spy Sweeper and it caught something called "winfo32.exe" on startup, it asked me if i wanted to remove it and I did but it just keeps popping up again after I remove it.

Anyway I will try CWShredder again later and get back to you. Thanks guys.

[marc]

Just take spyware and throw it in the garbage.