"Sponsored link" placed in many IE6 pages

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fred Athearn
  • Start date Start date
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Fred Athearn

I think that I have picked up some sort of bit of ad-aware or scum
ware. The last time I did a restart I found a bunch of commercial
shortcuts on my desktop and now every time I run IE 6 I find words and
parts of words on the web pages I visit have become hyper links.

For example in an article containing the word "publication" the "cat"
part of that word is a hyper link. The mouse-over message is "Best
cat" and the status bar message is "Sponsored link". The link itself
takes on to something called
http://toolbar.desktoptraffic.net/cgi-bin//ezlclk.fcgi?id=100 I think
that some of the links put a new shortcut to commercial sites on the
desktop. This is not just on one site but lots and lots of ones and
it all started at once.

I have run ad-aware and CW shredder and it has not fixed it. I think
that some sort of program has somehow changed IE 6. Perhaps I need to
somehow reinstall it. Any thoughts on this problem?
 
Must be the day for BHOs....

you need to remove the desktop traffic browser helper object.

Easiest way is download either BHO Demon or hijackthis

In hijackthis, the item you want to remove is:
O2 - BHO: ohb - {CB5B2BC6-F957-4D8A-BE67-83F3EC58BA01} -
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\DSKTRF.DLL
 
That did the trick. I found and ran the BHO Demon and it found
dskrtf.dll (last in a list of seven) and disabling it did the trick.
That was a bad one since a lot of bloggers I read put in strange links
that almost looked like the bogus dsktrf ones.

This just goes to show you what can happen to you running .exe files
you get from lime wire. And I didn't even have a current Ghost image
of my system. I was sweating it. No more working without a net for
me.

Again thanks for the quick help. But now suppose next I need to try
to find out what some of those other BHO dlls are. I only recognized
a few of the others by name. I will leave that for another day.
 
Glad to help.

BHOs are basically a good idea terribly abused. After working on problem
systems for a while, you just get to know which ones are evil and which ones
are good....and there are a whole lot more of the evil ones then the good
ones, sadly.
 
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