Look2Me is evil, and Windows is a bad platform
My home Windows 2000 machine is infested with Look2Me spyware.
Who knows which of our family of five attached this IE “shell extension” nuisance.
Now the question is: how I get rid of it? None of the published instructions has worked.
The vendor’s uninstaller doesn’t. (Of course it’s overly kind to call a producer of
unwanted intrusive privacy violation software a “vendor”.)
The manual uninstall directions haven’t worked either.
I know it’s still there because ZoneAlarm shows it trying to phone home.
Look2Me interacts really badly with ZoneAlarm, because while ZoneAlarm can and will prevent the frequent attempts by winlogon and rundll32 to contact 69.20.20.161 port 80, it does cause some kind of resource exhaustion that prevents any new TCP session from being establshed 20 minutes or so after a reboot.
Anybody with fresh ideas for uninstall, let me know. I suspect that people will be asking me for help for years to come as they find this page while searching for winlogon, rundll32, ZoneAlarm, or 69.20.20.161.
This all happened on a machine up-to-date with patches.
Patches and reactive measures such as virus patterns don’t change the fact that Windows is a bad platform, for even casual use.
The barriers against mischief are just too low – defense without depth.
