First off:
-Using Windows 7
-Mozilla Firefox issue
-Running AVG
-Running Spybot S&D
-All standard Windows firewalls are OFF (gaming issues)
-No other firewalls running
The last couple weeks I've started having problems with Mozilla Firefox. After a seemingly random amount of time, some type of hijacker takes over the browser and directs every page to random nonsense advertisements/ pop-ups/ business scams/ etc. Sometimes AVG says it has caught a threat when one of the hijacks happens, usually it doesn't. I generally kill the whole process as quick as I can whenever it happens, but I'm freaking out, hoping none of this will cause permanent damage.
I've had problems before, but none exactly like this. The only pattern is that it seems to happen after clicking between 3-10 links. After the hijacker kicks in, any link click, search, bookmark, any action that would normally take me to a page I want, will be redirected to a spam site. For the most part I've been able to solve nonsense like this in the past, but not this time.
So far I've tried:
-Multiple AVG / Spybot S&D scans, which did yield several results, but none remedied the problem after being removed.
-Uninstalling/Reinstalling Firefox (but leaving user info)
-Uninstalling/Reinstalling Firefox (deleting all files, shredding remaining folders)
-Manually looking through processes/ startup info (only a limited knowledge here, didn't see anything that I didn't recognize)
-Running HijackThis (yielding nothing I recognize as a threat, but then again I'm no expert)
Nothing I've done has cleared the problem as it usually would have. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: Forgot to mention that Firefox doesn't remember passwords anymore, no idea if this is related to the highjacker or not.
Edited by Perturabo, 07 June 2010 - 07:28 PM.
Move from Web-browsing to AII. ~ OB