SmartSearch Engine took over!

[Blurry]

I recently downloaded a file off of the internet which I thought was safe to open. It turns out that I was wrong. Now, each time I open up Internet Explorer, instead of the default website i get www.smartsearch.ws. I can't change back my default home page. The other problem is that if i type up a url in the address bar, for instance like Anandtech, I automatically get redirected to www.smartsearch.ws. Any insights? This is really annoying me. I tried deleting the registry entries, but no avail. The values automatically are copied back.
BTW, technical support is impossible. :disgust:

 

[Twista]

Download and install than run 1
than
run

This and update deftionions on both programs.

other that and nothing works than install this and paste the log here! or on there forums

 

[Captain4]

Read here. You can download HijackThis here.

 

[cheap]

In my experience these programs failed to get rid of hijacking unless I did it myself. One time it was an overriden pre www/http key in registry for internext explorer. What it does is add "http://" and "http://www." when you type say www.anandtech.com, IE automatically adds one of those keys in front to fix your address. Well, this program overrid http key to something like: "http://www.somefoowithpornadds.com/cgi-binblah?" so each time you typed an incomplete address without "http://" part, you would actually end up going through their website and immideatly beeing redirected to a correct address you typed. This happened to a cousin of mine and he couldn't figure out why the hell his browser keeps on opening up full screen porn ads all of a sudden. Imagine having people in the room

Another problem that I personally experienced was hijacking of search panel on the left. Even though I close it, it would still keep on opening some full page search engine all the time. Ad-Aware was useless, they would delete all the hijaking keys and erase them, but it all would come back when I reboot. Had to dig through registry myself and it turned out that them sneaky bastards were refreshing all the registry keys on start up through Run key and a .reg file saved on my C: drive.