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about.blank

chislop

chislop

I AM a llama!
Nov 11, 2003
2,311
1
about.blank- Has anyone else on PRE been cursed with this evil IE hijacker?? It's a default home page that is absolutely pernicious and extremely difficult to get rid of, and of course it tracks internet activity so that it can on-sell the info to marketers. My IE doesn't download pages properly anymore since the curse of about.blank- example is PRE which on my laptop has a white background instead of black and no lines separating topics etc. I'm over in the US and have tried everything to get rid of it- have bought and downloaded spyware, contacted Windows and followed their instructions, contacted the spyware company begging for help. Maybe someone in my homeland can help?? Please?......
 
I have about:blank set as my home page and have no problems.

I opened a site last week that had gone white instead of black. I cleared the cookies and temp files and ran easy cleaner and adaware and haven't seen it since.
May be coincidence though.
 
Hi rosy - here is an extract from the spyware company who are trying to clear up the problem for me:

The About:Blank homepage hijacker is a variation of a more advanced Cool
Web Search hijacker. There are several variants of the About:Blank
hijacker and all of them are very difficult to remove manually.

Maybe it's different over here in the US but I suspect not!!
 
Yeah I certainly don't have that GT. I just use about:blank by choice cos it's quicker than waiting for a page to load each time you open a window. Obviously yuor problem is a different thing.
If all your pages are like that anaemic one I saw last week I hope it's sorted out for you soon.
Hopefully one of our resident experts will be along to help out. ;)
 
You have been struck by a version of cool web search....it has a .dll file that renames itself on every re-boot. Took me 3 weeks to rectify mine. If you are lucky you will have an older version, the new ones are rated at 10 out of 10 in terms of removal difficulty. :eek:
Download coolwebshredder from the net, or if you want give me your e-mail address and I'll spear you over a copy. Alas spybot, adaware etc can not kill this beast!!!

Good luck
 
Thanks Bairdy - our IT guy is going to have a look at it for me (he came back from holidays today), and I will take your advice re: coolwebshredder, but if I can't find it I'll get back to you. By the way, I am constantly getting error reports from windows now - do you think all this crap has something to do with the evil about:blank?
 
I have recently been cursed by the Cool Web Search virus. For the first time in 8 years of owning a pc, I have had a virus knock my operating system over. Thankfully, my business partner has more advanced knowledge than I do with pc's. With his help we were able to partially repair the operating system to a point where I could save all the necessary files and emails that I needed. I then had to reformat my PC :mad: Fortunately I had backed up my Hard Drive.

I am running 2 x 80 GB 8Mb SATA Western Digital HDD's in RAID 0, so I was worried that one or both had gone to God. In the interim, I plugged in my spare 30 GB Qauntum Fireball, and it lasted 3 days before crashing. So I don't know how deep this rotten thing got into my PC?!! As with other users, I had all sorts of error messages, couldn't use IE, but I could use Firefox. I tried Cool Web Shredder, but to no avail. This is a nasty piece of work, and it annoys me that losers out there spend their time trying to make life difficult for others. :blah

Any comments?
 
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