Strange hijacking of Bing search engine....

[Adela]

[Dell Inspiron 560 desktop; MS Windows 7 Home; Windows Live Mail Essential; MS Word Pro 2003; Mozilla Firefox 22.0; Adobe FP 11,8,800,94; Adobe Reader 11.......]

I hope I'm in the proper thread? Two little questions:

1. My Bing search bar has been hijacked by shopathome.com and coupon.com. With much difficulty I tried to uninstall them, but they resisted. I then removed the shopathome.com from Firefox add-ons. BUT it continues to appear as a search engine in every other site I work on, not on all as before. The coupon.com is totally impossible to uninstall or remove. It seems the same company. Please help to remove these 2?

2. How can I reinstall the Bing Search Bar, but only the narrow bar across the top of my screen instead of occupying the entire screen with a large picture. Is it possible?

Thanks ever so much for any suggestions. Adela

 

[Mohammed K. Ansari]

http://blog.vilmatech.com/shopathome-com-popup-instruction-to-remove-shopathome-coupon-virus/

hope this helps.

P.S: get a good antivirus, and update it, then use the Torjan Horse Remover , this will fix your registry's which might be hijacked.

also if you know how to use the tool hijackthis, will be an advantage.

 

[marc8484]

Easiest way, try uninstalling directly from the browser, or even go to your Bing search bar, go to settings, and see if you can turn this feature off.

After that, I would go directly to the Remove/Add programs, remove it from there.

Thirdly, download and install CC cleaner, run the scans, clean everything out, especially your registry key errors.

Reboot your PC, go back to Add/Remove programs, make sure Bing search is uninstalled.

If not, try the process again, but I'm more than certain it should fix the issue.

Please, let me know.

 

[Adela]

Hello and thank you Mohammed and Marc! I followed as many of the good advice you so kindly gave me and....Success in getting totally rid of shopathome.com! THANK YOU!

But just as mysteriously as Bing Search Engine disappeared...it re-appeared, could it be because I also scanned with Ccleaner, Malwarebytes anti-malware, ckkdsk and the repair in control pane...twicel?

But it appears on some pages only, and it is the narrow long window across the screen which I wanted (as opposed to their full screen page); but when it doesn’t appear, there’s still the same window but without Bing’s name, and on clicking, it says: “This website does not supply identity”. However, now my browser page looks nice and neat with a lot of more room for the rest of the page.

Two little questions:

1. Is it ok the way I have it now, as described above?

2. May I know why there are 2 search bars: the long one, plus the short one on the upper right hand corner, identified as Bing’s. Does the short one have any particular need to be there? Thank you again!

P.S. May I know why this site doesn't let me copy my own message? Thanks.

 

[marc8484]

Hello and thank you Mohammed and Marc! I followed as many of the good advice you so kindly gave me and....Success in getting totally rid of shopathome.com! THANK YOU!

But just as mysteriously as Bing Search Engine disappeared...it re-appeared, could it be because I also scanned with Ccleaner, Malwarebytes anti-malware, ckkdsk and the repair in control pane...twicel?

But it appears on some pages only, and it is the narrow long window across the screen which I wanted (as opposed to their full screen page); but when it doesn’t appear, there’s still the same window but without Bing’s name, and on clicking, it says: “This website does not supply identity”. However, now my browser page looks nice and neat with a lot of more room for the rest of the page.

Two little questions:

1. Is it ok the way I have it now, as described above?

2. May I know why there are 2 search bars: the long one, plus the short one on the upper right hand corner, identified as Bing’s. Does the short one have any particular need to be there? Thank you again!

P.S. May I know why this site doesn't let me copy my own message? Thanks.

I don't believe that your search bar should be appearing and disappearing depending on the web site you currently are surfing. Perhaps, there might be another addon that is still installed or not working correctly.

Perhaps, you could post a screenshot of your issue? It's very possible that the shopathomeDOTcom installed other third party softwares as spam, which might be the reason why you still have a half installed search bar at the top of your browser.

Is this strictly in Internet Explorer, or you're speaking of Mozilla?

 

[Adela]

Thanks Marc, I checked the add-ons and I only have 2 files which I want to keep (my AV avast! and iGive.com. I suspect that the file CouponBar which is in my Uninstall Control Panel only, is the culprit now. Doesn't appear anywhere else. I've searched the internet for getting rid of it and....it scared the dickens out of me for all the things I have to do in the registry, etc. I just don't know how to do those things inn the registry....

I only use Mozilla Firefox, don't like IE. But I made a screenshot of the entire page showing the browser which, when I hover over, it says: "This website does not supply identity information". Lately this is the only one appearing. No more Bing so far. I hope i did it correctly and that you'll see it.

But, as you can see the Bing search window is a very short one appearing perpetually at the upper right corner of the page. What this is for...I have no clue, but it does search.

I hope you could help disentangle this web for me? Thanks again! Adela