Can I Remove Spyware istsvc.exe With Spybot and Ad-Aware?

[pmb_phy]

How in the heck do I get rid of this #$@# spyware, i.e. "istsvc.exe". I ran spybot and ad-aware more times than I can count and its still there.

Pete

 

[Grogs]

Pete:

I'll assume since you're posting this here it's really spyware and not some Windows component (I have stisvc.exe running on my 2k box, which appears to be the service host.)

I had a similar problem on my parents XP computer when I discovered they had some type of home page hijacker on there. After 3 hours of running Ad-Aware, searching the registry, and examining all of the applications and processes on the computer, it was still there.

I went out to the web, specifically downloads.com (follow this link for the download page) and found 'Hijack This' which did the trick.

It's a very powerful tool for getting rid of garbage on your PC. I would caution; however, that it's also a very dangerous tool if you don't know what you're doing. The results of a scan shows you everything that is different from the default Windows installation in it's raw form (registry entries mostly.) If you pull out something that *needs* to be running, you could crash your OS permanently. If you're just looking for the registy entries starting a particular executable though, it should be a fairly easy matter to find and get rid of it.

Best of luck,

Grogs

Oops, correction: stisvc.exe is the Still Images Device Monitoring service, which has something to do with linking to digital cameras and scanners. svchost.exe is the services host.