Anyone encountered this? A quick google search (on a healthy computer) yielded no help.

I have two user accounts on my windows XP box.
1) Whenever I google search using IE6 using the problematic user account (which is not mine), the first few results -- no matter what I search for -- are the same sites and are along the lines of "Buy this now!" blah blah and are totally unrelated to my search criteria. I pretty much have to go to the second or third page to see anything actually relevant to my search. This does not happen with Firefox, which is installed on my own user account.

2) Under the same conditions, whenever I put quotes (" ") into my query string, the search box automatically addslashes() it within the search box. This is something that would usually happen when a novice php coder forgets to stripslashes() a searched query for re-displaying in the search box. This doesn't happen on any other computer. I'm not sure if it happens on firefox or on my user account -- I haven't tried yet.

3) I can no longer log more than one person on at a time on this box because whenever one user is logged on, as soon as I try to log on an additional account simultaneously I get a BSOD (the stop error is something like c0000000x1 or something.)

Help

The usual advice (apart from the standard spyware searchers) is to run hijack this. Maybe you can do that and post the log, get started somewhere. It's definitely an adware thing though.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/forum22.html

Go to this forum and post your hijackthis log. The admins will look over your log and try to find your problem. They are really helpful.
If you don't get a post in 5 days just post in that "Haven't gotten a reply in 5 days?" and say you need your log to be checked.

Most useful post ever.

Stop using IE6.

I fixed problems 1) and 2) using hijackthis already haha (btw, hijackthis.de analyzes your log without needing a human to do it)

Problem 3) persists and appears to be unrelated, though.