ISTbar...Anyone here familiar with this?

[spaceman]

My son had a bunch of malware, adware, etc on his computer (XP home). I got everything out, but I can't for the life of me remove this thing. I tried deleting from the registry, but it won't let me do it. I've used a number of programs (SpyBot, Adaware, Ewido, Panda, Spyhunter, CWS, Trend, etc) to remove it, and they all recognize it, but they can't remove it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Bill Ward]

Duplicate post. Sorry.

BW

 

[Bill Ward]

Symantec has a removal tool available on this page.
About halfway down the page under REMOVAL.

Hope this helps.

BW

 

[spaceman]

Thanks Bill. I tried this yesterday and it said that I did not have "Adware.Istbar" on the hard drive. What I can't seem to get rid of is the "C:\Program Files\Istbar\xml_istbar.xml" that sits in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ISTBAR\historyfiles.

Whatever this is, it seems to be corrupting his Mozilla Firefox browser (latest build) because whenever I click on a link, the "stop" button flashes and I'm staring at a blank page. I have to keep clicking on the link about 5-6 times for it to work.

 

[grox]

Not sure whether this would work, but try rebooting in safe mode (hold down f8 when you restart/start up the computer). Then try removing as per the instructions. If that fails, you could try rebooting in dos (google for it) and then deleting the files that way.

 

[grox]

You could also check to see if something's starting up with windows and disable all non-essential processes. Familiarity with essential vs non-essential programs is a bit of a black art, I'm afraid. Use msconfig for this (run-->type 'msconfig')

Another thing to try (along with the stuff from my post above): try going to run-->then typing 'msconfig' and selecting diagnostic startup. After you reboot you might be able to eliminate that rogue file.

My apologies for my rushed and poor explanations.

 

[spaceman]

I think I'll just format and do a fresh reinstall. This is taking too much time and effort. Thanks guys.