Expert: Brian Benosky - 2/8/2008

Question
Hi Brian,

   Guess who?  Yep another problem.  On the 2nd someone who I have dealt with in the past suggested that I download something called Spyware Terminator and I think that I downloaded it on the 4th or 5th.  Since then I have had nothing but problems with it and the biggest problem is that it frequently froze my screen and gave me a popup icon that said "Grayscale" which turned the desktop a light shade of gray and disabled every program on the desktop.  I looked at Spyware Terminators's site and there is nothing on there about this "Grayscale" however if you Google "Grayscale" there are two hits that lead back to their site.  So today, after the fifty episode of my computer freezing up, I decided to delete the program which was done succesfully in Control Panel.  But to make it take effect I had to restart the computer and of course that disabled my Norton (as you know!) so I did System Restore to yesterday (the 7th) and Spyware Terminator appeared again.  So I went back to Control Panel, tried to delete the Spyware program, but got an error message that says; "c/programfiles/spywareterminator/unis000dat does not exist,  cannot uninstall.   Now I know that it is running because I have received one warning about spware from the program.  

So my question is basically if I restore the computer back to February 2nd (when I know that I did not have Spyware Terminator yet) will it completely eliminate the program?

And can you recommend a simple Spyware program that is reliable?

Thanks for your patience with me.

Answer
Hi Jack

Problems are my specialty!  Yes, a restore to 2/2 MAY remove the virus if it has not affected the System Restore files.  Best thing to do is to first send me a HijackThis! log, then restore the computer, then send me a second HijackThis! log to compare and check if it is actually gone.

As for a simple antispyware program, it depends on if you want to pay or not.  For free, AVG Anti-Spyware, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy are the best of the bunch.  If you don't mind spending some cash, PC Tools Spyware Doctor and Webroot's SpySweeper are two of my favorites.

Brian