Recently I have been hounded by this search assisstant hijacker, and a
related one called Shopping wizard. It has disabled MS explorer, amongst
other things. Also seems to be able to manipluate Spybot. They both show up
in the "add/remove" control panel and lead to an URL with no .isu file they
cannot be uninstalled. Oh, and here's where it gets really nasty, I
reinstalled XP, and there it was again, in the Windows directory, just a
collection of .dll's and an .lex file. The file folder cannot be deleted, or
if you are successful, wait 5 seconds and it respwans. Is this some MS
programmer's "Easter Egg"? By the way Norton does not catch it in a virus
sweep. I tied the file to these .exe's using fileAlyzer:
wuauclt.exe,lsass.exe,smss.exe,alg.exe, and I suspect it also has claws in a
few others. Can you help?