.....to top it all off, 24 hours later my firewall blocks an outgoing attempt from a sony rootkit.........
Jezzzzzzzzz. You should sue them.....
seriously
There are some root-kit detectors from sysinternals (
www.sysinternals.com) that may possibly reomve this, but this may be ugly stuff to get rid of....
There are some things you ay do to the setup of the system to totally avoid this, change file protections, run all multimedia on unprivileged user, and some more, but this takes a lot of windows knowledge to do....
I could possibly write a guid to this, but it would take me a lot of time....
Before switching to Linux I ran all my Internet Explorer stuff from an unprivileged user with no write access to any disks or folders, other than one given folder of my choice. This also has the effect that it basically prohibits virus attacks true IE. (not quite, but almost)
Tricky to setup, but it works