Monkeys with typewriters

I'm a humanities person; I'm certainly no IT genius. Somehow, however, I've managed to become my family's tech support, and usually, with enough web searching and forehead smacking, I can muddle my way through our various spyware problems.

Not today.

Around 7:30 last night, a rather annoying browser hijacker made its way onto the computer. Google sent me to random ad pages. AOL Mail ceased to function. Even Facebook refused to let me on. My entire arsenal failed: SpySweeper, Spybot S&D, AdAware, Bazooka, and HijackThis could find nothing wrong. In desperation, at about 8 AM I actually ran Windows Update, which hadn't been done in God knows how long.

61 updates, including Service Pack 2. It took about two hours to get the system back up and running.

Then I added Windows Defender, Microsoft's new anti-spyware freeware, but it also came up clean. Even Norton found nothing (granted, Norton's definitions date to approximately 2004, but it was worth a shot).

I hate admitting IT defeat, but around 2 PM I told my mother that I was hopelessly stumped, and suggeted calling Geek Squad. A quick check of their site revealed the bad news: $250 for a house call.

Well, I had nothing better to do than throw the ball for Callie, so I kept searching for something odd. After removing about 200 porn/casino/loan links from the registry (how did those get there?), I stumbled onto SpywareDetector, which isn't freeware but gives a detailed log of malware even without registration. The thing found 13 worms in less than two minutes, the worst of which I was able to remove manually by following the registry addresses and the directions into the system files.

At 5 PM, the system was functional once again, further proof that enough monkeys with enough typewriters will eventually come up with Shakespeare.

I did a geeky little happy dance.