Like a digital St. George

I went on a spyware hunting binge tonight. I figure the spyware is like a dragon, and by destroying it, I'm acting like St. George, except I'm killing it with a comuter instead of a lance or whatever else he's supposed to have used.

I noticed something was odd when I was getting IE-specific spyware when I don't use IE. I'd noticed that the the same few things kept coming up in my search with Spyhunter, so I decided to try with Ad-Aware and Spybot.

I first became suspicious when both of those told me I had the most up-to-date definitions, when both were still dated 2004. I installed new versions of both, and lo and behold, there are new definitions. Ad-Aware found almost 200 things on my computer, and Spybot is running right now.

I uninstalled Spyhunter. As far as I'm concerned, it's worthless.

Spybot has an immunization against bad plugins for Opera. I didn't even know Opera plugins could automatically install. You learn something every day. Naturally I turned on all the immunizations for IE (plugins, link redirects, host file updates, whatever else it offers), because even though I don't use it, it never hurts to be protected.

In addition, I ran HijackThis to hopefully permanently clean out a lot of things, changed my startup list in msconfig, and manually uninstalled and deleted suspicious-looking programs.

I'll tell you tomorrow if any of the above were successful, and Random Wiki Extravaganza will be coming up shortly. It might be a good one tonight, I hope.