Internet Explorer Homepage resetting

[CubicZirconia]

I built a computer for a friend of mine a month ago and everything was working fine. He recently caught his roomate watching porn on it and ever since IE keeps resetting his homepage to some porn site. I've had him run Ad-Aware, clear his temp files and delete his cookies, all to no avail. Any suggestions?

 

[damiano]

clean registry
run spybot

 

[CubicZirconia]

Originally posted by: damiano
clean registry
run spybot

What's a good registry cleaning program? And he's already run ad-aware.

 

[bunker]

text

 

[CubicZirconia]

Originally posted by: bunker
text

This isn't going to be fun.

 

[alkemyst]

aconti is a common one....the homepage deal is fixed by cleaning with a spyware proggie and then changing your starting bookmark....

Tools->Internet Options->Use Blank or type in whatever site

 

[Lvis]

Wouldn't system restore fix it? Just go back to before the problem started?

 

[CubicZirconia]

Originally posted by: alkemyst
aconti is a common one....the homepage deal is fixed by cleaning with a spyware proggie and then changing your starting bookmark....

Tools->Internet Options->Use Blank or type in whatever site

I'll try aconti, thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately cleaning with a spyware program and changing his homepage did not fix the problem, it still resets. Hopefully the registry cleaning program will do the trick.

Wouldn't system restore fix it? Just go back to before the problem started?

Possibly, but often times system restore screws things up even more. Since I am not there to clean up any mess that system restore might make, I am hesitant to reccomend that he use it. Then again, a regclean program might not help either, so maybe he'll be forced to try it.

 

[Miramonti]

virus scan
trojan scan (the Cleaner)

 

[alkemyst]

Aconti is a 'trojan', but it's probably the one you got...very common and hijacks the start page.

the webpage it sets is something like www.mit-whatever.com....some foreign site.

 

[CubicZirconia]

Originally posted by: alkemyst
Aconti is a 'trojan', but it's probably the one you got...very common and hijacks the start page.

the webpage it sets is something like www.mit-whatever.com....some foreign site.

I see. If this would have happened on my pc, I probably would have looked up "aconti" immediately. But this happened on my friend's pc who doesn't even live near me so I'm not in a real huge hurry to fix this. Thanks for the info though.

 

[wetobasura]

Use spybot S&D to scan after Adaware. Adaware does not always catch everything, but Spybot usually catches what Adaware misses

 

[CubicZirconia]

Originally posted by: wetobasura
Use spybot S&D to scan after Adaware. Adaware does not always catch everything, but Spybot usually catches what Adaware misses

Fair enough. Hopefully that will make the solution quick and easy.