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Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Internet Explorerer Mystery Solved?
Thanks to a Traffick reader, we may have found the source of the incessant Internet Explorerer pop-up windows. Here's the text of an e-mail I received from a reader named Greg, who accidentally found the source of the problem:
I was in the process of opening a PDF file in my browser, when that phantom window popped up. Then, BOTH windows locked up (some problem with the PDF, evidently).
Anyway, I hovered my cursor over the phantom window, and instead of seeing "Microsft Internet Explorerer" as usual, I saw this IP address: 207.246.124.101. It had apparently locked up at the exact right instant for me to see it.
I did a DNS lookup and found it belonged to vx2.com. A few minutes of searching the web, and I found this:
http://www.cexx.org/vx2.htm#remove
Basically, a dll called vx2.dll is responsible for the phantom window. It lives in your Windows directory, not in a temp folder, a cahce folder, or a temporary Internet folder.
This is an evil little bastard of a spyware file:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,49960,00.html
I almost certainly got it from an AudioGalaxy update. I'd be interested to know if, like me, you were using AudioGalaxy during the fall of 2001.
Anyway, I felt like I had finally found and killed that little mosquito that was buzzing in my ear all night. Very satisfying.
Wow, thanks for the tip, Greg! I did in fact run AudioGalaxy during that time period, so that probably was the cause for me. Furthermore, I uninstalled it a few months ago, right around the time the windows stopped popping up, so it makes sense to me...
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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