Also I should add that not all programs like these 'play by the rules' You may have to try and hunt them down and kill them. The result of application murder - as I like to call it - may result in a confused system registry. The way to do this is to find the culprit on your hard drive and erase the executable or the directory it resides in. Sometimes a registry will rebuild itself appropriately when you do this - other times it may not and you will get a pesky reminder every once and a while that the system cant find some program what you really didnt want anyway! To find the culprit - you can do a system search for a file named [application you have the hate for]. You may have to run 'Regedit', go into the edit tab and do a "find" for the name of that program. When it finds it in the registry, it will indicate where it resides on your hard drive.
Ideally, every program should have a means to delete itself, but unfortunately the world aint a perfect place (and sometimes even the lawmakers and police are corrupt and are only serving their interests and not that of the public.) In a nutshell - WaVy On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Don Cooper <wavyca...@gmail.com> wrote: > It varies based on what operating system you are using. > Hopefully it isnt Vista - 'cause I'm deliberately Vista Illiterate :-) > But you can try the following if its Win2000 or XP: > Hold Cntl-Alt-Del > Then a panel/popup thingy should show up that has tabs such as > Applications Processes Performance Networking Users > Select Processes and identify the program that is doing this > You might want to write down the name of the process that you know you > dont like > Use the Start 'button' on the lower left hand of your screen and find > "Control Panel" - it should be somewhere in there > Then go into control panel - find the icon that says "Add or remove > programs" > You might be able to match up the name of the offending executilbe with > one displayed in the list of Processes, > If so - delete it. > Of course you could have selected the offending process by it's image name > in the Task Manager's Processes tab, > then gone down to the End Process button and hit it. But if the process is > spawned by the User Name 'SYSTEM' it won't let you end it. > Also, you'd have to go back through the same process every time - so it'd > be better to try and wipe out the app rather than stopping it. > > There are viral ware and spyware products available from McAfee and > Symantic - I've not always had total satifsfaction with these. > > And of course - the only way to get rid of REALLY nasty spyware and malware > is to wipe out EVERYTHING with a byte by byte disk rewriter and start all > over again with a fresh operating system. > > -WaVy > (not responcible for financial, temporal or relationship losses due to any > advice given in this forum - use entirely at your own risk) > > > > On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Cynthia Lee <cynthiale...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Greetings all, >> Can anyone tell me 1) how I can tell if an unwanted program is running >> behind the scene on my computer and 2) if so how do I get rid of it? >> Thanks, Cindy >> > >
