Every ten minutes or so, an opera window automatically opens and directs itself to some angelfire website. If I'm in a game, it minimizes and opens the window anyways. Reinstalling opera didn't do anything, so it's an external program doing it. Adaware didn't detect anything suspicious.

Spyware, virus, worm, don't care what it is - I just want to get rid of it. Any ideas?

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

you could reformat.. [edit]wtf, three replies at the exact same time.

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What once was...

[This message has been edited by Warlord (edited June 14, 2004).]

Reformatting would be an obvious solution
But more seriously, no I have no ideas.

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

You can see if it shows up in Ctrl+Alt+Del, find the name of it, and manually search the WINDOWS or Programs folder.

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Titan A.E.

Hah I beat you!

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nytfyre m0d || f33l t3h p0w3r || t3h l0st c0gz || OMF > *

/me hits Darth Slaw with a blunt object

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Titan A.E.

Spybot and if that doesnt work

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/cwshredder.zip

^^^CWshredder works for somethings spybot and adaware don't pickup

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When you expect the pain - nothing left to ascertain
When you respect the lie - Deadly chasm open wide
---Circle of Dust "Chasm"

[This message has been edited by FH_PhoenixFlame (edited June 14, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by FH_PhoenixFlame (edited June 14, 2004).]

It should be in your task manager. Close one process at a time (don't shut down important system processes and google suspicious ones) and only continue if it continues happening. Make note of each process you close, obviously.

a broser hijacker for opera? i'm intrigued.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Hardly, just a process that launches a website, and since opera is the default handler, it will open in opera over IE.

I don't think Windows will let you close down anything vital to the system. Win2k doesn't, I know that.

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

--End of Line--

Win2k absolutely lets you close down critical systems. I have done it, and it wasn't pretty >

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EvilMagic.net: Brian's Web Log

In addition to CWShredder, HijackThis is a very neat program. It helps you to quickly spot programs and other nasty things that are loaded, when windows starts (even if it's not necessarily 100% relevant to your problem now). It helped me a lot, when adaware and CWShredder were powerless.

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Frozen by ICARUS

Ok well this seems to be happening immediately when I connect to the internet. As long as I'm offline, nothing pops up... strange.

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

Really? Interesting... If I was to try and close... say... the System Idle Processes right now, it pops up a window informing me that the "Operation could not be completed. The operation is not valid for this process." and that's that. I'm attributing that to it not letting you close down things vital to the system. Am I misinterpreting that?

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

--End of Line--

Also, when clicking on links in opera, I randomly get error messages saying "connection closed by remote server". Don't know if it's related or not. If I reboot it stops for awhile, but comes back afterwards.

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

The second problem sounds isolated - my guess is that it might be related to your connection setup. Perhaps your configuration needs to be tweaked (drivers, etc).

Hijack This is pretty much designed to fix your browser problem, but I don't know if it works for Opera...


Good luck and... shouldn't this be in the tech forum?

What would happen if the System Idle process was dissabled? I've always wonderd.

I'd tell you, but like I said, I can't close it down. Brian must know the secret trick to doing so. Frankly, I'd be curious to know what it is so I can try it.

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

--End of Line--

The alignment of the stars will fall out of balance and Windows will be confused to why CPU usage isn't at 100%. It will then panic and attempt to overclock itself to somehow compensate for this, your hard drive will overspin, and your floppy drive will blow chunks.

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Please send me e-mail....

use IE

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/fluffle

The problem isn't opera, it's something on my system. If I set IE as my default browser, it just opens an IE window instead.

I had this crazy idea last night - to set my default browser as IE, then delete iexplore.exe, and use opera... but most likely it'll still keep popping up when my opera window is opened.

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

Try Hijackthis if you haven't already.

Also, if you can, try to remember when this infection happened. Then check your windows and windows/system32 folders to see if there are a bunch of new .exes (and maybe also other files and even folders) that were created at the same time, the very moment when your problems started. You should then delete those files (with some caution). Some of them are .log files, which will even report some of the things the trojans (or viruses) tried to do.

This is the method I had to use to get rid of one tough trojan infection a while ago...

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Frozen by ICARUS