Just wanted to commend the technical assistance I got from HALNet Support to rid my system of a 'homepage hijacker' called 'i-lookup. The technique for doing so is attached with the helpful correspondence leading to the cure. It worked great, especially with the 'HijackThis' site. HALNet technical support has been phenomenal.

Response from HALNet Support:

If you cannot change your homepage back to what you want, it may be that your homepage was "taken over" or "hijacked". Please see the following for removal.

Ad-Aware 6 is a free multi spyware removal utility that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely. Download it from www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/ or a mirror site at www.majorgeeks.com/article.php?sid=506&cat=31.

You also need to see what is running in the startup area to see if the culprit lies in there too. You can compare your Start-Up Applications to the list at www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_all.php to determine if they are related to your problem.

You can also read more about Changed Home Page Hijacking at: gmpservices.com/Articles/hijack.asp, www.spywareinfo.com/articles/hijacked/, www.cexx.org/hphijack.htm, and www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_h.htm (Scroll down to the Home Page Hijacking section.)

If this does not help, call HAL-PC at 713-993-3300 and ask for a volunteer to help you.

Thank you for using HALNet.

Check What's Running in the Background
From: Roy W Stiegler, Jr. stiegler@hal-pc.org
Subject: Cheap Modems

I read the letter about the aggravating cheap modems.

I can toss in my 2 cents.

For some time recently, I had noticed a slowdown in performance when logged on to HAL-PC. Until it finally just slowed to a crawl. Nothing helped. I bought a US Robotics super duper real modem as recommended. No help. Finally I used a free download spy bot search and kill cleaner. I found that I had 62 different parasite downloaders all vying for my computer trying to call Moscow and tell central intelligence what I had been doing. Sometimes, it would get so slow that it would time out waiting for all the requested data dumps to come on line. After clearing all that parasite garbage out, everything is back up to speed. I run about 20kbps out here now in Cypress at the end of the telephone line. That's about as good as it has ever run.

I now have used a US Robotics real modem, an AOpen Win Modem, a Lucent Kflex, and several other cheaper ones. I have 4 or 5 different computers laying around doing different things. The AOpen runs the best for me, but they all perform adequately, mostly limited by some overloaded server at the end of the line that I am trying to access.

So, if users are having some problem with their speed, they might want to clean out all the parasites in the computers. I just run that clean up program everyday before I start and I haven't had any further problems.

I might add, that upon connecting I always saw a connect speed of 48kbs or so, indicating everything was kosher. If I made a line check, it always said it would support a 56k modem. But when I tried a bandwidth test for real file transfer, it would be reduced to a crawl. A bandwidth test like the one from CNET, or practically any other on the Internet.

Browser Problems
From: Carl E Miller cmiller6@houston.rr.com
Subject: Netscape 7.1

Hi, just thought I'd drop a line to fill you in on a problem I encountered. Here goes.

I have been using Netscape from the 3.0 days and gradually upgraded through the 6 series and now the 7.02 series. On the first of July I upgraded to the 7.1 series. Hello Josephine!!!!!. It looked and worked fine hooray. Lots of improvements. The first day it worked fine, the second day it worked fine and then on the third day Disaster struck. I was on line and suddenly Netscape asked for my profile. Hello what??. , so I went off line and then tried to get back on line. It wanted my profile. Well I got on line again and all my URL's, and saved messages were gone. That's right gone. So being thoughtful I called Netscape, sorry that is a PAID issue. So I forked over the $39 per incident charge to see what I needed to do to get my Netscape files back. The answer was Nothing - - -they are gone. Wait a minute, I know they are on the hard drive somewhere. No they are gone the telephone told me. After a lengthy conversation I was able to get my information across. I did have a backup. How could I restore my files from the backup? Nope they are gone the telephone said. After explaining they had been saved 24 hours earlier and the program was running OK she said, OK. See if you can restore your Mozilla folder. Well I did but that did not correct the problem. I uninstalled Netscape 7.1 and re-installed 7.0. That did the trick.

For everyone's help, here is what I had to do. I went to my backup set and found windows\application data\mozilla. This file I copied into the windows\application\mozilla (overwrote) and then tried Netscape 7.1 No go. OK so at this stage I removed Netscape 7.1 and installed Netscape 7.0. BINGO it worked. As a precaution I saved the mozilla file to another drive (just in case). If anyone has problems in this area I'll be glad to recount my experience.

Thanks, Carl

PS This is the first time I had to pay to become a BETA tester.