Spyware Doctor

Welcome to Major Geeks!

I have requested the owners of Major Geeks to check into this thread. In the meantime, if you want help cleaning your PC of any malware, we can do that for you. Also I would like to see a log of what Spyware Doctor believes that it found so we can directly comment on that.

By the way, PC Tools contact info is right on their web pages: http://www.pctools.com/contact/



If you do want to work on cleaning your PC, please follow the instructions in the below link and attach the requested logs when you finish these instructions.

• READ & RUN ME FIRST. Malware Removal Guide

• If something does not run, write down the info to explain to us later but keep on going.

• Do not assume that because one step does not work that they all will not.

Notes:

1. If you run into problems trying to run theREAD & RUN ME or any of the scans in normal boot mode. You can running steps in safe boot mode but make sure you tell us what you did later when you post logs. See the below if you do not know how to boot in safe mode:
   
   • Starting your computer in Safe mode
2. If you have problems downloading on the problem PC, download the tools on another PC and burn to a CD. Then copy them to the problem PC. You will have to skip getting updates if (and only if) your internet connection does not work. Yes you could use a flash drive too but flash drives are writeable and infections can spread to them.

 

I believe they used to put logs into the below folder:

C:\Program Files\Spyware Doctor\Log

However their logs are not typically very useful due to the fact that they write them as XML files. You cannot attach XML files here so you will have to put it into a ZIP file to attach it or you will have to fake out the upload by renaming the file to have a .txt extension.

 

The try getting a window snapshot of the info and post it here. Make sure you just zero in on the information of what is being found so that we can read it. If you take a full desktop snapshot it will not be legible.

I still recommend that you run our cleaning procedure so that we can tell you whether you are clean or not. Spyware Doctor has been know to have false positive issues.

 

If you click the plus signs where it says Host entry it would give more info but it may be truncated. However based on this little snapshot, I expect these are all false positives. You probably have use a program like Spybot (or another) that has added lines to your hosts file to block bad sites. However I cannot say this for sure without seeing exactly what the entry is under the + signs.

Did you make a large hosts file with some program? If so, a quick test would be to restore the default hosts file and then run a scan. You can do this with the below:

Download HostsXpert and then follow the below steps.

• Unzip HostsXpert.zip
• It will create a folder named HostsXpert in whatever folder you extract it to.
• Run HostsXpert.exe by double clicking on it.
• Click the Make Writeable? button (if you only see a Make Read-Only selection, it is already writeable so skip this button).
• Click Restore Microsoft's Hosts File and then click OK.
• Click the X to exit the program