muon.html

The weekend started so well. Through a series of circumstances I went to see Evita at the Neptune Theatre. That was a very enjoyable show.

I got home around 11 PM. I was going to do a quick login and check my e-mail and get to bed by 12.

Unfortunately when I logged in the computer was in a bad state. The screen was covered in popups that kept appearing on their own. The popups were for stupid sites that all seemed to end in muon.html. Even Firefox was popping up extra tabs when I tried to do anything. I couldn't open a command prompt or the task manager. After a couple of minutes Windows defender put up a screen saying it was going to reboot the computer to protect it. Big trouble.

It was difficult to get the computer working well again. I ended up running numerous scans and fixes with windows defender, ad-aware, spybot and hijack this. That cleaned up all kinds of stuff. Finally after I cleared out that bunch of other crud, I followed these instructions to get rid of muon.html. The instructions worked great and now the computer seems to be working properly. As a bonus I got rid of a lot of junk from auto startup that was making it take way to long to start up.

Where did it come from? That's a good question. I noticed that the trouble appeared shortly after my wife downloaded limewire. As part of the work to get rid of the popups I zapped limewire. I hope I never see it again. I noticed that of course limewire is as stubborn as the viruses to get rid of. After the first attempt I got this dumb java message every five minutes about some missing gnutella class. So limewire seems to be built on gnutella - wonderful.

It's annoying because this has happened before. Months ago my wife started using Kazaa. For about a week she got some files she liked. Then the popups, weird error messages, IE start page change, and Google hijacks showed up. That was a lot of work on me to clean up. After Kazaa vanished the popups went away too. I don't know why she thought it would be any different with limewire which is just kazaa by a new name as far as I'm concerned.

I have to use the computer too to log in remotely to work and to just use. If I had the money I'd get a wireless router and my own computer and just use that; let my wife clean up the viruses while enjoying her downloaded stuff.

I don't see the point of downloading music from unknown sources when iTunes is something like $0.99 a song, and Yahoo music is $7 a month.

It's troubling that Firefox was affected by the trouble. In the past stories of trouble in Internet Explorer were like hearing about strife in the Solomon Islands, Sudan or Nepal. Trouble in a faraway land that didn't really affect me. I guess Firefox is popular enough now that the black hats are disrupting it too, which sucks.

I know of people who have suffered with random popups for like months. I was thinking of setting up a removal service to try to make some money off this.