First, I'm dealing with a very insidious malware infection by the name of "Privacy Components", thats one of those wonderful "free spyware destroyers" that loads itself on your computer and begins slowing everything down and giving you regular pop-ups, wanting you to register for the expensive full version that probably does nothing more than remove the lousy program itself. If that.
I've trusted Ad-Aware in the past to provide me with good service in dealing with similar problems. I should mention that this issue is on my son's computer, and that he's running Vista. He had the usual Microsoft Defender, but we also qualified for a full version of McAffee which we downloaded through Comcast. It DID NOT detect Privacy Components.
I've tried several other free trials of different spyware scans, with similar lack of results. AVG Anti-virus didn't detect it, but then, I guess its not really a virus...Anyway, I eventually came across Ad-Aware on C-Net, and had a moment of (Doh! Why didn't I try that first!?) because its worked well for me in the past. Assuming I could run it that is... Downloaded the free trial, and I now have an
Ad-Aware icon on my desk-top that doesn't seem to do anything?!? Unless you count the times when I've double-clicked on it and the system has crashed. Thought possibly some of the security settings might have been affecting it, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Worse than that, I think I should have Ad-Aware Plus, through one of those offers at TrialPay? (Honestly, I was trying so many things that my admittedly swiss-cheese like memory doesn't remember all the details...but I do have a message in my email to that effect.) So if this is actually the full version of the program...why doesn't it work?
So, in summary my two questions are: 1) What hoops do I have to jump through to actually run AE? (And um, why do I have to?)
and second question 2) Has anyone else slain the demonic "Privacy Components"? How the hell did you do it?
