istbar

[ritaxis]

I have run Norton, Spyblaster, Spybot, and Ad-aware to try to get rid of this and it's still there. It's the first nasty little thing I've had in a long time, and the information about it on the Symantec page is dated March 3 of this year. There's older versions, apparently, that are easier to remove.

Right now there's one registry value left: ISTbar.Slotch: Autorun settings, which in the Registry Editor has a little icon which looks like it indicates a text file (the letters ab on what looks like a scrap of paper),Name(Default), Type SZ, Data: value not set. I think that this autorun thing reinstalls the rest of the garbage. I have the Registry Editor open but I read that somebody had tried manually removing it and lost everything. I'm stumped.

It's an annoying little thing: it slows things down sometimes, it interferes with connections, and it throws up popups. We had had none of these problems in quite a while.

Edit: I appear, after running Spybot a third time (and Ad-Aware three times, and Spyblaster twice, and Norton automatically finding it and not being able to get it gone), to have finally removed the thing. It seems so, anyway.

Re-edit: I am so glad I did not try to remove that by hand. Crawling around the directory I notice that all of the things in the registry editor look exactly the same as that. No wonder that one person lost everything. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

You may want to run a Google search on this, too. Very occasionally I've run across things that need a special fix, but many webpages like Norton, etc. will give you specific instructions on getting rid of these extra-nasty buggers.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

yes, I've done the google thing, which is how I know about people trying to manually remove it and losing all their stuff.