Removing Crap Software

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ShoobieRat

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A coworker of mine foolishly left his work PC laying around where his kids could get to it. While said coworker was off somewhere else, said kids installed some crappy MSN thing called "ZoneGames" onto his machine.

LOL

Okay, without laughing too much...how do we remove this thing? Of course, MSN gives no mention of how to remove it, and it doesn't show up in the add/remove programs. We found 'A' folder concerning ZoneGames, but it appears that this is a good peice of crap software, and it has littered itself through the whole system. Ad-Aware, Norton, and SpyBlaster, don't pick this thing up as bad.

Anyone have any experience with this? I'm half inclined just to let him roast (for not putting a password up on his WORK MACHINE)...but he's a nice guy so I gotta give him a hand... :(
 
It's a microsoft program, not malacious but annoying. I would try googling how to manually remove it
 
SHAWN said:
start>>settings>>control panel>>add/remove programs
I'm not that stupid, pal. Read the WHOLE post before you post, because if you had, you would have noticed that I said it wasn't in the "add/remove Programs". This was a joke, right?

Originally posted by DJ-CHRIS
It's a microsoft program, not malacious but annoying. I would try googling how to manually remove it
Yeah, I tried that. Of course, it's one of those annoying things that very little has been written about. I searched through about 30 pages of Google responses, plus the Microsoft site and the MSN site. Nothing told. Knowing MS, it's probably embedded it's like a tick and I'll have to spend 4 hours picking through the registry by hand...

Any other thoughts welcome...
But only if you actually read the post first...


JCIAC
 
sorry your whole post didnt load the last time so i couldnt read it all if it doesnt show as bad in addware locate it in command prompt and try removing it that way. also see if you can find a way to edit your registry so it shows in add/remove programs i know theres a way to do it for messenger maybe theres a way to show hidden software programs as well. another thing is try and use the temp files maybe its not a program just a file that is acting as one (sorry about my earlier post i hate it when people do that so when i do its kinda embarrising) other than that i got no clue worse case scenario its a trojan and it was somehow activated. good luck on figuring it out
 
I think he's got a legacy key hanging around in the registry. ZoneGames isn't showing up in msconfig, which is strange, especially since when he boots, the ZoneGames window comes up on startup. Usually those things are visible somewhere.

I'll have him run a registry cleaner to try and sort things out. Chances are, it won't solve the problem, since he's found a bunch of games associated with ZoneGames that can't be removed through add/remove like MSN suggests....Definately funny stuff going on. This one's got me stumped good.
 
Try this: Go into the C:\WINDOWS\inf directory, and open sysoc.inf in notepad. Then look for an entry that says ZoneGames, and make sure it doesnt have "hide" or "HIDE" anywhere in the string. If its there, and it says something like ,hide, just delete hide out of the commas, so it would look like: ,, When it has hide in the string, it is hidden from add/remove programs.
 
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