Eraser Failure.

S

swordfish44

New Member
Hi. I have been running Eraser successfully for several years but have recently had a failure. A group of unexpected icons appeared on my desktop (names cookies.cfg/cookies.lst/hijack.cfg/iedata.cfg/new.dat and prefs.cfg.) and having satisfied myself that they had no legitimate function, I triggered Eraser with the maximum 35 passes option. Much to my surprise, they were all back again at the next boot-up and they have continued to resist erasure after a number of attempts. Can anyone explain this and suggest what I can do to zap these interlopers,please. ?

Regards, Swordfish. :(
 
I was going to suggest running an antispyware / antivirus etc check but after doing a quick google on the icon names to see where they might be from I found a post similar to yours on an AOL message board and (if it was yourself) you said you did a thorough anti-malware check. If so, then you've already done what I was going to suggest (and what I would have done if I'd had the same problem).

Can I suggest that you do the free pandascan check too, just to see if it finds anything?

http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/ActiveScan.htm

If not, then can you check your startup items in msconfig to see what is loading at startup - if you want you can post the list of items here and someone might be able to see if anything is causing these to appear.
 
Hi Robbie. Thanks for your quick response. It was me on the message board and I had done the major check on malware. I've had a nunber of goes at the PandaScan both yesterday and today but I can't get it to activate. Anyway,I had a look at the Start-up list and noticed that it included my SpwareStopper ap: which has been acting rather strange recently by opening unexpectedly and I realised that the sticky icons had been reappearing after a deletion at about the same time. I unchecked it and did another Eraser delete and haven't seen the intruders since. !! A couple of things puzzle me about this issue. 1) Why couldn't 35 passes erase these files and 2) What is the procedure which brought this peculiar group of files (you've see the list of names on message board) into the relationship with SpywareStopper. ? Any suggestions would be welcome.

Regards, Swordfish. :?:
 
swordfish44 said:
Hi Robbie. Thanks for your quick response. It was me on the message board and I had done the major check on malware. I've had a nunber of goes at the PandaScan both yesterday and today but I can't get it to activate. Anyway,I had a look at the Start-up list and noticed that it included my SpwareStopper ap: which has been acting rather strange recently by opening unexpectedly and I realised that the sticky icons had been reappearing after a deletion at about the same time. I unchecked it and did another Eraser delete and haven't seen the intruders since. !! A couple of things puzzle me about this issue. 1) Why couldn't 35 passes erase these files and 2) What is the procedure which brought this peculiar group of files (you've see the list of names on message board) into the relationship with SpywareStopper. ? Any suggestions would be welcome.

Regards, Swordfish. :?:
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I must admit, i haven't got a clue! Perhaps it's just one of those things that computers do from time to time to baffle us?

By the way, the 35 pass erase wouldn't really make any difference in that if 1 pass wouldn't get rid of it, the other 34 would make no difference. If eraser is going to delete a file it will delete it whether it is one psuedorandom pass or 35 wipes. I can only guess some registry setting was causing the problem and recreating the files at startup, probably from an errant program that wasn't running properly...
 
Alos, if that SpywareStopper program is still in your startup folder and you have it unchecked, check it again, restart your computer and see if these files reappear. If so you may need to reinstall SpywareStopper.
 
Hi Robbie. That's what I've just done to confirm that SpywareStopper [u}was the culprit and I've now reinstalled it and all is well. !! Thanks for your interest.

Regards. Swordfish. :D
 
swordfish44 said:
Hi Robbie. That's what I've just done to confirm that SpywareStopper [u}was the culprit and I've now reinstalled it and all is well. !! Thanks for your interest.

Regards. Swordfish. :D
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ah, good to hear!

Like I said, it must be one of those random things that happens to computers, a program goes astray and a reinstallation often works!
 
I think you will find eraser did it's job and erased the files, but they were re-appearing at boot because the program you were having problems with was probably restoring them from a cache. Don't ask me why it would do this, as I am not conversant with Spywarestopper.
 
Thanks for your interest S.C. I've not had any recurrence of the problem since I reinstalled Spyware Stopper and Eraser is working properly.
Cheers, Swordfish. :)
 
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