YK You hit it on button;
He had two different hosts files. Exact same addresses in both. One was
called WinMEhosts. Any idea what program did this? It had every think
blocked from yahoo, to sears.com. My buddy is more of a Novice than I am,
I'm just hoping the Adware got the culprit. I just renamed them both with a
weird extension, but I'm worried that some app is still on his PC and will
recreate.

Thanks again, fastest reply I've ever got from a newsgroup.
jp

"YK" <YKnot@home.invalid> wrote in message
news:1YCKa.18443$H9q1.7816@news04.bloor.is.net.cab le.rogers.com...
> John Pierce wrote:
> > Has anybody run across a spyware that won't allow you to open
> > certain sites, and redirects? Friend of mine was telling me that he
> > could not get to yahoo.com. I visited his house and realized that he
> > had been hi-jacked. But instead of just resetting his home page, this
> > bug seemed to redirect some of his URLs. When he wanted to go to
> > yahoo he was being redirected to a site that looked like an official
> > "Can not find server...." but it also had links to search, shop, and
> > play games. Dummy me I didn't try to figure out the URL he was being
> > sent to I just downloaded and ran the latest version of ad ware and
> > it recognized 208 pieces of junk, which I removed. Now instead of
> > getting redirected it just won't allow him to open certain sites like
> > Microsoft, and Yahoo, he now gets the "server down, try home page /
> > refresh" error. I am going to have him reset his browser settings and
> > see what that does. I tried to get him to update IE to version 6.0
> > but like I said, he can't even get onto MS sites. Any suggestions?
> >
> > thanks in advance
>
> Some nasties modify the HOSTS file. Nowadays the HOSTS file is used for
> ad blocking.
> http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
>