PC Gurus/Help with Explorer home page

Someone was surfing on my pc and must have got onto a bad link or site. Normally I use ask.com as my home page, but now there is a search page that shows up that I do not have a clue how it got there. You know what I mean, one of those "would you like to use ____ as a home page" kind of deals.
Now whenever I go into internet options and clear out cookies, this new home page will return and manifest itself in my browser.
So my question is, of course, how do I get rid of it permanentlt? Getting tired of having to reset my homepage. Any idea where to find this program so I can give it the ole 86?
Guess I should add that it's on IE 6.0, and I'm using an older IBM thinkpad with 700 something meg processor and 4 gig HD.

When you have the browser open, click on "Tools" on the top menubar, then click on "Internet Options" on the drop-down menu that appears. Type in "http://www.ask.com" in the little window under "Home Page" (without hitting Enter or Return), then click the "Apply" box at the lower right of the drop-down thing. Then click "OK" to get rid of the drop-down thing.

That ought to take care of the home page issue.

A nasty little program has probably been downloaded that keeps re-setting your homepage (may have also added a lot of links/bookmarks to your favorites).

lop.com - is one example of this type of thing, their mp3 search portal contains some rather nasty and difficult to remove spyware.

There are numerous tools for removing these programs, firstly do a Google search along the lines of how to remove NAME OF YOUR CURRENT HOMEPAGE and see if that brings up anything useful.

If you fail to find any removal tools, try downloading Ad-aware, it removes spyware and some of these nuisance programs.

You`re probably infested with some kind of spyware/malware. Exactly what, I don`t know, but you can remove it and everything else unpleasent that is lurking in the shadows of your HDD, surprisingly easilly.

Go to: http://www.lavasoft.de and download/install the free version of AdAware 6. Open the program, hit "check for updates", the program will download the latest reference file. Now hit Scan and watch as it discovers all sorts of frightening things, and then allows you to remove them.

Then go to http://security.kolla.de and download/install Spybot search & Destroy. Do the same thing as you did with AdAware. Spybot catches things AdAware doesn`t, and vice versa - hence why I always reccomend both.

Finally go to the control panel, open Internet Options, set your home page back to what you want it to be, and that should be fixed. Once a week I`d reccomend running a scan for spyware using both programs. Spybot has an Immunise function whihc blocks re-infestation from things it knows about. It won`t stop everything but I`d reccomend turning that on.

Oh, and go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download the security patches they have avaliable for IE if you havn`t already done it. If you`ve never done it before there will be loads of them. That should cover up a fair few commonly exploited vulnerabilities, though as any Mac user will tell you, IE has more holes in it than a cheese grater does so it won`t be long before yet another one is found.....

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Download the lasted version of HijackThis . After you run a scan, if you're still unable to understand what has hijacked your browser goto http://www.spywareinfo.com . Spywareinfo runs a forum with some extensive and excellent security information. You can run searches for discussions of hijacking start and search pages. It's an excellent resource.

Thanks guys, gonna try some of those downloads. I'll let ya know how it goes.

You know, I been a member for awhile and recall tons of threads about this kinda thing, guess I shoulda read them.

Installed the adware and spybot. Adware found 21 items and there was 4 on spybot, including the redirect software that was affecting my homepage settings. All gone now, all better. Thanks for the help.