Hosts (?)

Hello,

Re WIN98SE

I have the programs Filemonitor and WinPatrol.
These programs say that "Host > not found" and "No hosts" respectively.
According to my registry there seems to be a relation to "Shell Folder"
Though I do not experience any problems the Free AVG virusscanner mentions: Shell.dll > Change > Changed.

The only thing I should like to know is whether I may expect horrible
things to happen in the near future.

Best regards,
Nelson

 

Have you ever had a hosts file on the computer? You would've had to install it if you did since Windows doesn't come with one and it's not really needed.

I don't know anything about Filemonitor or WinPatrol. Perhaps they have a feature to check the hosts file and are just telling you there isn't one? Some malware does mess with the hosts file.

 

Hello md2lgyk,

Thanks for your answer.
So "no hosts" is a good thing.
Should "shell32 changed" in AVG be left alone ?

nelson

 

Not sure about shell32.dll. Perhaps someone else can help. I also use AVG but have never seen such a message.

 

Hi Nelson Beagle
Shell.dll and Shell32.dll may change when you do a Microsoft Update. There are system icons embedded in this file and a couple of the user interface functions are accessible through this library. If you haven't done an update from Microsoft, then your anti-virus software may be trying to inform you that Shell32.dll was altered by some other program. If you ran one of those icon librarian "free" programs, with administrator privilege, something as simple as a changed file flag could alert AVG. If you did use a "free" icon librarian, it may have created a HOSTS file so that it could list it's home address for faster connection( it wouldn't have to first access the DNS server entries at your ISP).

 

Hi colleague senior,

No hosts present, but I regularly download updates from Windows Update.
I have found out that there is an "ostrich-way" to solve "shell32 - change" and that's downloading a another Free AVG virusscan. Then AVG says: OK

Thanks for your excellent help.

Nelson