[Hamilton Felix]

A few days ago, my MSN main page had a handful of fun things for Valentine's Day. There were links to pro and con Valentine's jokes, and some to screensavers. I decided the free download of a Valentine screensaver would be a cute thing for my wife to enjoy.

I downloaded, then started to install. I have ZoneAlarm and AVG. AVG warned me once, but couldn't specify a virus or delete, heal or quarantine it. Looked like a false alarm, no virus identified.

After I finished installing, I played with the screensaver a bit. It seems to be working. Within a day or so, I noticed the computer was really slow, hung up, generally wasn't working well at all. ZoneAlarm prompted me a couple of times about a new program trying to access the Internet. I told it to block the attempts.

I ran Spybot Search & Destroy. In addition to the usual DSO Exploit, Spybot found two other spyware programs, and one of them said it had nine counts. Can't imagine it installing itself in nine places in one computer. But I let Spybot take care of it. I think the PC is clean now, but what the heck happened? This is Microsoft on the MSN network. Why would those lowlife dirtbags link me to Spyware? I'm ticked!

[EdPPCLI]

Hey HF
Glad to hear you fixed your AD/Spyware problem. I just had my own runin with this crap and ended having to use several products to finally get rid of it. I was doing a google search and ended up going to a web site that installed the "CoolWeb" adware...really nasty, spybot and adaware couldn't handle it. You should really fix that DSO exploit, thats how these self installers get on your system.

[Hamilton Felix]

I just had a friend tell me how to disable DSO Exploit. Thanks.

[alpaca cath]

How timely!

Just how the heck does one disable DSO Exploit?

Spybot keeps finding it on our 'puter and we keep seeing a lot of data exiting our computer, but we just today spent $129 to have a computer geek tell us that there was nothing wrong with our machine and that the slowness problems just don't exist!

ZoneAlarm will not allow anything to go in either direction from our computer, so we disabled it. But, now DSO Exploit is back, as it seems to always return.

Any thoughts on this frustrating state of affairs would be appreciated!