Good morning, kind people. I am so glad to have discovered you!
I'm an untrained computer user but still (I hope) have a little more knowledge of them than my husband and teenage son, so I'm the designated problem-fixer. I'll be using your wonderful website a lot from now on, because we've got a slew of things that need fixing and I'm going to learn how to zap them all. I've been reading through the threads and have recognized several of the adware infections that we have, so I'll try to deal with those by following the already-posted instructions.
There are a couple of things that I haven't seen mentioned here, and I wonder if someone could give me some general information about them before I get started on this reclamation project.
The most annoying one is Lycos Flashlight Search, which redirects me to a list of hotel and shopping links when I attempt to use any other link. I can sometimes get around it by typing the EXACT address for the page I want, and disable it by un-checking the "enable 3rd-party browsers" option in my Internet Settings. However, it switches the enabler back on every time I log off the computer, so I have to switch it off again before I go online. Today I found it hijacking one of the links posted here (in an earlier thread, from March) even though my 3rd-party browser option was OFF. I'd love some help getting rid of this.
The other thing that puzzles me is something called VJun2.exe, which "encounters a problem and needs to close" every single time I turn on the computer. It is located in the Prefetch folder, but I don't know whether it's supposed to do something good or bad. As far as I can tell it doesn't do anything but send its little error message. However, I tried deleting it once (having backed it up to a disk), and my computer was all but paralyzed afterward, so I put it back in. Does anybody know what this might be?
Thank you all for your time and attention.
Eman L. Ramos
San Diego