Andavari

Thanks Tarun, however Windows One Cure isn't exactly what I had in mind since I do have the time and technical expertise to secure and manage my computer on a daily basis.

You can keep a favicon if you open the Temporary Internet Files folder, find the icon and then copy it to another folder. Depending upon how a webpage is written the favicon may be in one of your systems temp folders like: C:\Windows\Temp Note: Internet Explorer will give you a warning about copying any files from the Temporary Internet Files folder. After you've copied the favicon you can then right click the favorites shortcut and set it to the favicon you've stored elsewhere.

It's safe to clean all of the issues detected, CCleaner unlike some other programs with registry cleaners only finds safe invalid entries to remove, it doesn't have the "best" registry cleaner however it does have the safest. If you're at all feeling paranoid go ahead and save a backup when a dialog pops up. A good place to store any backups would be: C:\Program Files\CCleaner\Undo Tip: Keep re-running the issues scanner until nothing is found.

The "ZoneAlarm tvDebug.log Emptier.bat" was just a name I gave the batch file, you can name it whatever you wish. If you don't understand exactly how to create it here's some more instructions: 1. Open Notepad. 2. Save an empty document as (use the quotes): "%windir%\Internet Logs\tvDebug.1" 3. Close Notepad, and then re-open Notepad and input the following three lines (copy and paste): XCOPY /Y "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.1" "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.log" ATTRIB +A "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.log" EXIT 4. Save this document anywhere you wish as (use the quotes): "ZoneAlarm tvDebug.log Emptier.bat" You can move the *.bat file anywhere you wish, I put it in the "C:\Windows\Internet Logs" folder and then created a shortcut to it in the ZoneAlarm start menu program group. It's only purpose is to copy the 0 bytes file tvDebug.1 to the tvDebug.log.

Microsoft Search. I didn't look at what the search results are, however to get a correct answer get it from Microsoft.

Although I don't like MSAS because the GUI is slowish/sluggish, and it ties up my dial-up connection for some minutes I would have to go with it merely for its plethora of resident protection agents. If Microsoft is smart they'll turn MSAS into more than just an anti-spyware program and integrate anti-virus features, and a full featured firewall as well and make it a standard feature of Windows.

What I experienced could just be system specific, e.g.; a specific problem running on my systems. However I'm pretty good at finding bugs and faults in programs. Internet Explorer can be blocked by an outbound firewall, however just running explorer.exe to load a website will circumvent it which is completely silly, I surely don't understand why Microsoft will allow explorer.exe to fetch a website and then dump it into Internet Explorer. That's a huge security risk and is one reason why I deny explorer.exe any Internet access and have been doing that for approximately five years now. Also using a software-based proxy server in the form of some ad filtering software can fool an outbound firewall by letting a blocked Internet Explorer access a web site.

LoL

Yes farewell DJ, he will be greatly missed here by all. This forum in my opinion has lost a genius. I'm not in charge however in my own opinion (now that I can look back) I think it was a mistake to add HJT analysis to the CCleaner forums, to me it seems that it dominates the forums. Although many people have had excellent help to remove malware from their systems, I personally think HJT analysis should be moved elsewhere to a different forum that is solely dedicated to providing analysis and security advisement, and let the CCleaner Forums revert back to being the CCleaner Forums. To me all forums go the route that a few or many long time members "may" be experiencing, e.g.; the honeymoon is over. As an analogy (think that's the proper wording, unsure) I love mint flavoured black tea with sugar and Equal to sweeten it however if I drink too much of it on a regular basis it doesn't seem to have any taste whatsoever (weird just had to throw that in). I think this happens when a forum (experience) is no longer new or exciting, and becomes a sort of routine like a job. That's just my take on it, and how I generally experience forums since I can get bored doing just about anything real fast. Glad to hear I'm wanted on Lunarsoft, however I'll have to think about it for a bit. I probably won't leave the CCleaner Forums, however if the likes (in no particular order) of; rridgely, CaPMan, Tarun, englishmen, agumon were to no longer show up I'd probably jump ship as well, however I'd still visit here from time to time hence I'll have to download new versions of CCleaner.

Compacting the registry has the potential of screwing up! I had a problem luckily only with some shortcuts after running NTREGOPT. There's also RegCompact.NET which displays the before and after compression results before committing to an actual compression which can save time if compression isn't necessary.

To my amazement the Task Scheduler does the same thing on my WinXP SP2 system, I only found out when trying to add a new scheduled task.

When I used to use AntiVir it was when they had an English forum and a good forum it was, however when they suspended their English forum and only had a German forum I stopped using it since their forum was the only form of support for the free home edition. There's another antivirus product that looks just like AntiVir however it isn't free with the same GUI, etc., so perhaps they share technologies with another vendor, sorry I don't remember the name of it.

Now you know what to ask for as a Christmas present.

From the about.com review it says it monitors the registry. I've previously used security programs that monitored the registry and they would always bite me on the bullocks by completely annoying me whenever I'd try to edit something in the registry, add a blocked site into the HOSTS file, etc., therefore I don't think I'd like Prevx Home. These type of security programs would be great if they'd be smart enough to know the actual PC user is the one making the system changes, not some malware.

You should never have two antivirus, antispyware, running and/or scanning at the same time, they'll conflict with each other possibly causing false positives and may very well crash your system. The only way to have two installed antivirus programs coexist in harmony is to have one of them completely disabled, e.g.; its resident shield must not be active. When you want to scan with the disabled antivirus scanner you must remember to disable the resident shield of your primary antivirus program. Since there's always a conflict waiting to happen with two antivirus programs installed, it's better to use one of the free online virus scan services, however you still have to remember to disable the resident shield of your installed antivirus.

To keep your MS Office settings intact do the following: 1. Cleaner->Applications->Applications->Untick the Office reference. 2. Reconfigure MS Office to your liking with confidence the settings will remain.

AntiVir stability-wise doesn't agree with my WinXP system for some reason although I used to use as a secondary scanner on my Win98 system some years ago. It falsely detects virus code in my batch files that perform various automatted tasks on my system. I tried Sophos either last year or two years ago (don't exactly remember), however I do remember not liking it that much. I can't give much more of an explanation since it didn't last 30 minutes on my system. I haven't tried any Kaspersky product for many years, just seems like more bloatware, although I do know they have good detection in their antivirus products.

Never heard of it until now. There's a review about it on about.com.

Killing them isn't a solution, since some other malware writter would continue it.

In all honesty I liked the GUI in the old AVG6, I'm not too fond of the GUI in AVG7. However that's a moot complaint hence it's freeware antivirus that's benefiting millions on the web (not just AVG users) by reducing the spreading of viruses and the like. Avast on the otherhand can be made to look dirt-simple during its installation by deselecting the option to install skins. I initially couldn't stand Avast because it looked like a media player. However after finding out the skins installation could be disabled I completely changed my opinion about it, and when my eTrust EZ Antivirus 1 year trial ends I'll be making a decision between either it or Avast (minus the skins).

Yeah but the line "it basically is a firewall that doesn't block anything" was pretty hilarious.

I don't know what to tell you, hopefully the CCleaner developer Mr.G will see this thread to offer assistance.

Better is a user defined choice. However I will tell you this; CCleaner is safer. I say this because I've seen System Mechanic's registry cleaner destroy the system registry on some systems by nearly removing all of it when only a few "invalid" references it found were removed. There's also this thread CCleaner vs. Other Disk Cleaners.

Well with Office 2003 the problem comes from other disk cleaning programs deleting opa11.bak, deleting that file will cause some programs to request the Office 2003 install CD, I suspect some programs need a file *.dll, or *.ocx that's normally installed by Office to run, prime example being mscomctl.ocx. I don't know if opa11.bak exists in other versions of Office or if it does what the actual name would be, however Office 2003 installs it into: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA\ For Office 2003 the following two files should be left alone and not deleted: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA\ * opa11.dat * opa11.bak

If only the likes of the FBI, and/or Interpol would nab them, take their computers, make it illegal for any of them to ever own a computer again, and finally put them in a prison cell so deep their meals would have to be catapulted to them.