Ok I have some spy program on my other computer. It says system alert in the bottom right hand corner and when I click on it it wants me to buy some sort of spyware program. I looked it up and it's some sort of trojan that makes you buy the program to get rid of it.

Anyways does anyone know of a great free spy ware program that will get rid of this? It's extremely annoying

lavasoft adaware is really great for a free program. as is spybot search and destroy. Use both of them in tandem for great coverage.

adaware and spybot wouldn't take care of this one. I finally found a program called prevx1 that gave me a free trial and took care of it. I think the actual virus/spyware/malware or whatever it was, was called a zlob, i believe or something like that. Anyways, it's a nasty little bugger that took me about 3.5 hours to clean. It was a pain in the a$$.

still got traces of it, every time I open internet explorer it goes to protectionband.com What a pain in the a$$. But I've gotten rid of those annoying pop ups and system alerts at least. Anybody else had this thing?

Try this program and see if it fixes the problem:

http://siri.urz.free.fr/Fix/SmitfraudFix.exe

Open the SmitfraudFix folder and double-click smitfraudfix.cmd

Reboot your computer in Safe Mode (tap F8 while windows is starting up).

Open the SmitfraudFix Folder and double-click smitfraudfix.cmd file to start the tool.

Select option #2 - Clean

Wait for the tool to complete and disk cleanup to finish. You'll be prompted : "Registry cleaning - Do you want to clean the registry ?" answer Yes

Poppa,

Did you disable System Restore as part of your cleaning? If you didn't, MS will actually restore some things after all your hard work. Just curious.

I disabled it while I was trying to fix it. I now have turned it back on, should I have not turned it back on?