IE has gone crazy

[Roots]

I left my newly built PC at home for four months while I went to school (first mistake), and my 14 year old brother convinced me to let him use it to play games and crap (second mistake).

Now that I'm home, he has screwed up IE in a way I've never seen before. Pop-ups for just about every damn site I go to. Every website I go to has some words underlined in green (like calender, game, etc), and when you click on them it re-directs you. When I go to Google and do a search, I don't get any results. Just a bunch of links to crappy sites to buy crappy stuff for crappy prices. I'm running WinXP and IE6.

I suspected Spyware at first. Installed Spybot and caught a few things which I cleaned up, but the problem didn't go away. My brother had to install Netscape on my PC so that he could visit sites in a sane fashion again. There are absolutely no problems with Netscape. The only thing I can think of to fix it would be to re-install IE, but has anyone ever heard of spam as severe as this? Is there any other way to fix it? I'm worried that its gone as far as to infect my windows registry and I'm going to have to format my HDD someday when it attacks.

Thanks for any feedback, and remember the moral of my story: *DO NOT* leave your precious, brand-new PC with your 14 year old brother

 

[igowerf]

Install Ad-aware too. Have you tried going into Add/Remove programs and seeing if you can uninstall anything? Go through your Program Files folder too to see if anything can be uninstalled. If it's still screwed up, maybe reformat?

 

[Roots]

After posting I updated Spybot and did another system search and it found a few things. I think that the problem is fixed. I'm using IE now with no problems. It was a program called ClientMan, and it was running when Spybot tried to remove it so I had to restart my PC. As I feared, it had itself inside my registry files. It calls itself a "Browser Helper Object". I'd really like to find out who's responsible for infecting my computer with this, and then do a little damage of my own :| Thanks though

 

[clicknext]

You could just reformat and reinstall Windows. I suspect even that might take less time.