Browser extremely sluggish( possible solution )

[winetou]

I'm posting here because this seems to be the most visited part of the forum even though it doesn't seem to have much to do with TDS, but it may save some people a lot of time if they are having the same problem and this turns out to be the cause. I do have TDS and like all other apps didn't detect this because it's not really a trojan ( I don't think so )

I read elsewhere that people were trying to figure out why their browser started slowing down especially when typing into form fields like this one or even dragging to copy text, it takes a couple of seconds to select what you dragged over. I spent almost a week trying all scanners, spyware, adware fighting software and nothing worked. Most people seem to think it has to be some key monitoring spyware ( that's why browser slows down so much when typing into forms and input fields )
which triggers ads based on what you type on google or whatever.

Finally I discovered a file named my.css in my windows/java folder. Seems that this file was loading at startup and somehow affecting Internet explorer. File is only about 1.5K and just contains a bunch of numbers. If anybody is interested I still have it. It is definitely the culprit, at least in my case. I deleted it and restored a couple of times and while it was in the recycle bin, my browser was behaving normally. Severe slowdown when file was restored.

[Pieter_Arntz]

Hi winetou,

You can find more info and a cleaning tool here: http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html

Regards,

Pieter

[winetou]

Thanks, I didn't see that page before.

But, I cleaned it up manually. I just posted in case others are facing similar problems. In my searchin the past two days I saw quite a few people complaining of these symptoms, but there didn't seem to be any cure.

I see from your link that this is a couple of months old, at least.

[Pieter_Arntz]

Hi winetou,

That's correct. In fact we had one of the first victims here:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=10109

I would recommend running CWShredder though. It takes less then a minute and it will clean out anything you might have missed.

Regards,

Pieter