WinAntiSpyware 2007 is evil, rotten, and is betrayware / malware.. Some how this little gem of a program found its way into my computer. I am not sure what I downloaded or installed or which page I viewed that infected me, but AVG caught it as it was installing. AVG did not actually stop it completely, though. The folder was completely installed and it was trying to download an ‘update’ by the time AVG notified me.

WinAntiSpyware 2007 is a rogue anti-spyware parasite that displays fake warning messages and tries to scare you into buying the full version of this program. WinAntiSpyware 2007 greatly exaggerates the threat level to your computer, and once bought, it may install additional malware into your system.

Nice, huh? I spent several hours reading up on how to remove this. I finally found my answers at the techguy.org forums and someone there helped make sure I was all clean. The only problem is after I was no longer infected, certain things would not load properly, such as EverQuest II.

Jack to the rescue! He looked at logs from my system and the Launchpad logs for EverQuest II. Once he compared the results he determined the BITS (background intelligent transfer service) got hosed. I have no idea if it was the WinAntiSpyware 2007 crap that did it (most likely), or one of the fixes I used… but we corrected it by installing WindowsXP-KB923845-x86-ENU.exe from the Microsoft Download site. Now my game works and everything is running perfectly.

It made for a very stressful day, though. Instead of being productive and getting things done, I stressed and worried about removing this POS before it could do any real damage. I’m disappointed that AVG didn’t stop it from installing but am thankful it at least warned me it was happening. It’s times like this I wish I had some sort of lounge in the backyard, maybe something like teak outdoor furniture where we could have gone afterwards, to sip drinks and bask in the sun. Instead it was dark by the time we got everything going and almost time for bed. Oh well. At least it was a learning experience. Live ‘n Learn…..