I never thought my secret addiction to soap operas would land me in a world of trouble, but last night it did. You see, I’m a huge fan of General Hospital (GH). I started watching it as a kid with my grandmother, and now that she’s passed, it’s a nice way for me to remember her by carrying on the tradition of watching. At least that’s what I tell my self so I won’t feel so bad about my guilty pleasure.
Recently, one of my favorite soap actors, Sarah Brown, was written off GH in a way that I found very unsatisfying. I became determined to find out the “real” reason for Brown’s hasty departure. In doing so, I visited a lot of blogs, soap boards, and various sites. In doing so, I inadvertently picked up a Trojan virus that launched several Internet Explorer windows automatically. My antivirus software was unable to delete the virus, so I thought I’d work around the problem by uninstalling Internet Explorer 8. I went to the Microsoft support website, and was able to follow their somewhat arcane instructions. The problem was because of my operating system, I couldn’t really uninstall IE; I could only downgrade from IE8 to IE7. I found it absolutely unreasonable that I couldn’t remove IE using the Add/Remove programs option in the Control Panel. So now I became determined to find a hack that would enable me to uninstall IE.
I visited countless geeky, tech sites and tried dozens of unfruitful fixes. I learned more about my computer (and my dogged determination) than I bargained for. (Like my operating system has no true Administrator super-user account). In the end I was not able to uninstall IE7, but I was able to disable the IE pop-ups by using my anti-virus software to designate IE as an untrusted application. All in all it was an inelegant but successful hack.
And now I return to what I should really be doing: reading Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.
P.S. Other lesson learned: My antivirus software says Actress Sarah Brown’s website (www.sarahbrown.net/) has a Trojan Clicker virus. I strongly advise you not to visit her website until it is removed. Viruslist.com says the following about Trojan Clicker viruses:
“This family of Trojans redirects victim machines to specified websites or other Internet resources. Clickers either send the necessary commands to the browser or replace system files where standard Internet urls are stored (e.g. the ‘hosts’ file in MS Windows).
Clickers are used:
- To raise the hit-count of a specific site for advertising purposes
- To organize a DoS attack on a specified server or site
- To lead the victim to an infected resource where the machine will be attacked by other malware (viruses or Trojans)”
