I've been "GOT".

Checking my e-mail yesterday and I looked into the spam folder to make sure that something didn't get misplace.  In the spam folder was a item send by "FEDEX".  Got curious and open it.  It mention that my package would arrive within 7 to 10 working days.  This e-mail was send to a whole truck load of folks who's e-mail id started with a "B" so, that was a good indicator that it wasn't legit.  It had a 10 k attachment and curiosity got the best of me and I clicked it. Well, Yahoo will scan all your downloads first before downloading and it came back clean.  So, I still scanned it with Avast and again, no threats.  It was a zip file so I extracted the contents and it showed up as a 20 k Adobe document.  I clicked it on to open it to see what was inside and it disappeared.

Uh, oh...

(!!!!!!!DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DOCTOR SMITH DONE WENT AND DID IT AGAIN!!!!!!)

After throwing up my hands and hollerin' a few times, I set down to trying to undo with I done do do.  And the first thing was to sic Avast back on it and do a full system scam.  But Avast wasn't working.  Avast was out to lunch.  Avast was filing grievances with it's union reps.  Avast was shooting me birds.

Spybot.

Yes, Spybot is the ticket.

So, I ran Spybot and I had to go to work.  I disconnected the modem before I left so my computer wouldn't be talkin' to any strange computers and commit a social faux pas while I was gone, those can be so embarrassing to fix.  When I returned home from work Spybot found the usual gallery of rouge tracker cookies and then some curious registry items.  So I told Spybot to fix all and it came back and told me that those registry items could only be fixed by an administrator.  I checked and sure enough, I was the administrator and informed Spybot of that fact.  Spybot called me a bald face liar and shot me a bird.  I tried to reason with it again and it started squallin’ for it’s union steward.

By this time I was gettin’ beady eyed lookin’ at it.

But Spybot was nice enough to show me the addresses of where in the registry these items were.  So, after checkin’ my survival equipment, I took a stroll down memory lane and into the registry and had to find each and every one of these items and hand delete them.  Then it was a rebooting and another check by Spybot and I got the all clear.

Except, Avast still wouldn’t work.  I then had to uninstall it, download it again, and reinstall it, reboot and now it works.  So, all is right in the world.

I hope.