I just got done trying to get rid of a nasty bug off a PC here at work...Spent most of this morning de-bugging.

I think a virus infected the computer somehow started redirecting Internet explorer to porno sites. Supposedly the problem first poped up during a routine Web search involving what appeared to be "innocent" sites related to Las Vegas).

An Adware scan, Bazooka scan, and AVG Antivirus scan all came up empty finding the bug when I first ran them, so I was perplexed as to what could be causing the very obvious porno pop-up problem. AVG finally found it: after the scan had come back showing no problems, I tried to again open Internet Explorer, and then suddenly as the pop-up started to appear, AVG told me "VIRUS FOUND!". AVG told me it couldn't fix the problem directly because it was in an explorer system file or some other "do not delete" file. Of course I proceeded to delete the file anyway!

Needless to say, the more I tried to fix the problem the worse it seemed to get. I tried the System Restore feature of XP (usualy a great problem solver in dire circumstances like this!), taking the system back to November 30th...A date that was long before any of this crap showed up...But still the problem persisted. I tried resetting the IE settings to their original defaults...still more failure...Then when I was on the brink of waxing the entire hard drive and fresh installing the entire O/S (I mean how many hours is it worth before you just gotta give up and start from scratch) I finally got rid of the problem by uninstalling and then re-installing Internet Explorer. It was as simple as removing the check in front of the IE line in the Add/Remove Windows Componets, rebooting, and then re-checking the IE line in the Add/Remove Windows Components. Somehow that truely reset everything to a nominal state...(even without inserting the XP disk) The only residual effect seems to be that I lost "My favorites", there is no history, no cookies, and apparently no bug.

Now I'm holding my breath waiting to see if this bastard once again rears its ugly head. Wish I would have wrote the name of the bug down, but of course I didn't.

Oh well, I guess this beats doing real work!

Scott Evil