One for any PC experts out there

[Papa Lazarou]

A new icon has appeared in my task bar. Its a yellow smiley face (arrowed in the picture) and I have not got a clue where its come from or WTF it is!!

The WEIRD thing is, if you move the mouse pointer over the icon, it then disappears - like its taunting you or something. I'm worried it might be an indication of a trojan. My virus scanner (up to date) doesn't pick up anything.

PLease can you have a look at the pic to see if anyone recognises this icon!

Thanks

[Cthugha]

Don`t reconise that one but i have seem similar.
The only real way to stop them is to open regedit and browse
to the following key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run

In there is a list of all progs that run at startup and i`ll bet there will be a strange one that needs deleting.

If your unsure post a screen shot of the keys and i`ll tell you which one it is.

[GenerationNexus]

Is your virus software any good though and have you run a scan of your entire system? Up to date may not be enough, I could write a virus this morning or even just wrap an existing one and it would go undetected unless your software looks intelligently enough at the heurists.
These are free, try www.grisoft.com for virus software and also
www.zonealarm.com for a reasonable personal firewall (which in pc tests has scored highly in penetration tests compared to some you pay for)
Don't recognise the icon but is almost cerainly a virus.
Have you tried looking it up on semantics site, I would but I'm in a lazy mood and should be xmas shopping right now ...

[Dave_S]

Papa,

It's not anything to do with this ... http://www.geocities.com/ebnitro/playback.html or this (doesnt mention taskbar though) http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_99311.htm

Dave

[Tenman]

could be somesort of spyware like Gator, goto www.downloads.com and get ad-aware, hell, if you browse a lot of porn (etc) running this will speed up your connection immensly after its got rid of all the sex-trackers and double-click cookies

[Papa Lazarou]

OK some ideas there :) I'll do a FULL system scan asap with heuristics enabled (takes bloody ages though :( ) Don't like the sound of that virus Dave_S but it says its not in the wild yet? Perhaps I'll have the dubious honour of being one of the first!!

I'm running McAfee online virus scan and ZoneAlarm, McAfee last updated 2 days ago the firewall was updated about a month ago.

Attached is a snapshot of the registry keys. I'm a bit suspicious of the Trojan Guarder program.... Its shareware that I've found out originates from China. I might try removing that. All its done so far was a scanned the system and removed some Creative Labs software which it said was a trojan/spyware.

Cheers

[Dave_S]

Looking at that list, the only suspicious one is the trojan guarder.

Dave

[Papa Lazarou]

Originally posted by Dave_S
Looking at that list, the only suspicious one is the trojan guarder.

Dave

I'd agree. But OTOH it was downloaded from download.com and is one of their more popular anti-trojan programs. This smiley business didn't start straight after I installed that program. Still I will remove it anyway and see what happens.

[Papa Lazarou]

You're supposed to pay for it after a certain number of starts. Seems like this is maybe a none too subtle reminder!! Gits!

Oh well I have now wiped it. Cheers for the help!