I'm dirty

I've been defiled! My home page is now "about:blank"! I have become one of my customers. Yes, my browser is hijacked! I think this is the BrillantDigital one that is so stinking nasty. Certainly explains the sudden performance issues that had me rebooting. I thought the streaming was killing my machine (could have been the open port on 8081 that let this happen but I can't be sure). I also had a couple of worms. Looks like I may spend the morning cleaning my machine instead of getting work done.

1. Remove old adaware
2. Run Spybot Search N Destory
3. Update Avast
4. Run CWShredder (wow! CWShredder moves around a lot. Used to be by intermute but Trendmicro is maintaining it) and HijackThis
5. Reboot after Spybot's removals and Avast's prompting for a reboot.
6. Install new adaware
7. Launch Trendmicro's Housecall
8. Run Avast
9. Run Spybot
10. Run Adaware
11. After my computer beeped 5000 times (the number of popups blocked by Adwatch) I rebooted.
12. Restarted Avast scan
13. 2nd Ad-aware scan
14. Checked Add/Remove programs for offending software
15. Removed View Point
16. Used Regedit to manually inspect registry..looks good
17. Totally afraid to open Internet Explorer or Outlook..thank goodness for Firefox!
18. Recovered Homepage (no longer about:blank) but IE won't remember cookies implying that something still has me. Performance on machine down.
19. Downloaded and installed MS Antispy(been needing to evaluate it anyway)
20. Oh, the new version of adwatch blocks tracking cookies ergo my website info wasn't saving. Think I'm in the clear now.