On 29/01/2014 09:16, Tim Lamb wrote:
In a momentary fit of insanity I allowed an offering of Explorer 8.0 (I
think) to download.

The only visible consequence is an overnight firing up of Explorer such
that I am greeted each morning with a Windows related advert.
Curiously the screen is prevented from entering sleep mode.

Today's offering was for a Windows driver scanner for a Brother printer.

I am using XP with service pack 3. I know this system is about to be
unsupported so am becoming very nervous about anything uninvited!

Any thoughts?

Do you have another computer that you can use to make a bootable CD to
scan this machine for any known malware? Corrupting IE to make it show
adverts or hijack keystrokes is unfortunately all too common.

You can't trust the main machine any more. There are some tools that use
enough obfuscation that they might be able to detox an infected machine
without being noticed by the malware. I have found MalwareBytes to work
fairly well on other peoples infected PCs YMMV

http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebyte...-10804572.html


--
Regards,
Martin Brown