I friend got this royal pita on his computer somehow and I can't remove it no matter that I try.

It will not allow Spybot S&D to even come up and run.

All I've found on the Internet are various "Free removal tools". I hate the thought of downloading something I know nothing about because I'm leery of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Anybody successfully removed this from a computer?

I will wipe the hard drive out and clean install the OS if I have to but that's a last resort.

I kind of remember that the guys who make Spybot have a forum and it sounds like they would be interested in whatever this is. I know way back I got some weird crap that they didn't know about yet. I brought the code file up in a text editor and right in the middle of the code was a note about it not being supposed to be used outside a laboratory and removal instructions. They were happy to get that information.

I would go that route first.

-Hal

Thanks Hal. I never would have thought of that.

download combofix (find it in google) works like a charm

It's fairly easy to remove if you are comfortable with Windows Task Manager and registry editing. If not, there are several tools that will automate the needed tasks for you. Here\'s one and here is another.

I'll post the manual instructions for removal if you're interested.

MalwareBytes is another tool that will remove that piece of crap. You can find it at majorgeeks.com. Get the free version, run it and remove what it finds, reboot and update the definitions, and run it again just to be sure you have everything covered.

Thanks for the links. It's all over now. I've never seen a system as hosed up as this one was.

I managed to get an anti-virus program to run and clean quite a few viruses but it was going to take more time than he was willing to pay for so I saved the pictures he wanted and did a clean install yesterday.

I think I've figured out what started the problem in the first place. A teenager (who thinks he's a computer expert) turned off all of the protection services "So the Internet would be faster".

From what I saw in the browser history I guess the porn wasn't loading fast enough for him.

I removed ASXP2009 from a friend's computer about two weeks ago. I had to explain to her that she paid $100 for spyware. She stopped the credit card payment thank goodness. I booted in safe mode, and went in to "regedit" and got rid of every instance of the thing. It took several hours and many reboots but I got it all. I am sure there are faster ways to do it. These spyware companies send popups that look like Microsoft dialogue boxes and people believe them, and get scared. It's really criminal. That thing really messes up your machine.

I don't use windows anymore, but I have to tell you that a free tool I found very useful for dealing with registry issues was Eusing registry cleaner. It used to get rid of a lot of that stuff. I would run it about twice a week. Sometimes a lot of the same stuff would come up because of start-up but it wasn't the malicious stuff. Also for line by line stuff "Hijack this" was pretty good if you feel somewhat confident fiddling around with the registry. None of those darn problems with Linux - thank goodness.