Sunday, March 27, 2005

Prefetch, Stupid Jump Tray and Registry Cleans

It started with the system slowing, then freezing up all together. Admittedly I was running a lot of applications simultaneously, Excel, Outlook, Firefox, IE, ICQ, MSN, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, CuteFTP, Winamp and more. However the machine is a 3.2Ghz Intel Pentium 4 with 2 Gb of Golden Dragon Geil RAM. Should be able to cope - and usually did.
So I wondered why and went straight to the task manager to look.
Additionally I was trying to install Firefox 1.02 and after installing it the application wouldn't open, although its process was in task manager.
The first thing I noticed was that an application called stupid jump tray.exe was hogging all available CPU time. Whatever was spare it was taking and causing the CPU to run at 100%. Additionally an application called Build Program appeared now and again.
The first thing I assumed was that this was a trojan or virus of some sort. However scans revealed nothing.
Next I ran Adaware and then Spybot, free malware and spyware cleaner tools. While they picked up a few things they didn't fix this.
Next I ran RegCleaner and removed some applications I didnt need.
Still didn't fix it. A search on the hard drive for the file located it in the C:\Windows\Prefetch directory. I renamed it and it came back.

I opened msconfig and removed something called realbait.exe that was starting up when the PC started. Noting the location of this (Username\Application Data\ThisFirst) I discovered several exes including realbait, stupid jump tray and others. I deleted the entire directory.

I then searched in the registry and found it and removed the entire registry entry. It had attached itself to the Search Assistant.

Finally I googled C:\Windows\Prefetch and located a Prefetch cleaning tool on the Major Geeks Website. I downloaded and ran this (changing the Prefetch settings to Boot only as recommended by them).

Finally!
Success!
Clean - fast operating PC once more.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:11 AM |