My google search thingie is fubared.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

At the top of Firefox is the address bar of course, and to the immediate right of that is a small bar/window/thingie you can use for web searches without having to navigate to an actual search engine page like google.com or yahoo.com. It's customized to allow you to search in multiple search engines, and you can open a drop down box to choose which one.

Ok so now I got that explained: suddenly it's on drugs. I love this little feature and use it all the time; now, I type something into it, it brings up a page of links for me, but when I try to click on any of them, it suddenly reroutes to all sorts of weird random sites. It only happens when I use the google one, not the yahoo or the wikipedia or the ebay ones or any of the others it offers. But when I go to the actual google.com page, I can search and then click links to my hearts content without a problem.

I looks to me like I've downloaded some little nasty bug somewhere that's doing this, the problem is I can't seem to figure out what it is that I downloaded, and therefore I can't go into uninstall programs and just get rid of it.

Anybody got any suggestions?

[technical.angel]

Run MalwareBytes in safe mode (tap F8 at startup). You can find MBAM at malwarebytes.org.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

Ok angel, I downloaded and installed the program you recommended. But I am not able to open the program, it gives me the following message:

Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

I've tried opening it in both regular and safe mode, and I've tried 'running as administrator' to open it, and neither works.

I guess I'll have to keep looking for something else. Thank you though.

[Broomjockey]

Wow, sounds like you have more serious issues than it first seemed, if you can't run malwarebytes. Find something like a CD to start backing up any vital data (no flash memory).

[Geek King]

Try this: Once you have malwarebytes installed, restart the computer in safe mode. Next, go to the folder you installed Malwarebytes to, and find the file named mbam.exe and rename it to mb.exe then run that file. The virus may be blocking the named file, and may be fooled by renaming it.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

Tried that, Geek King, and no go. Wouldn't give me permission to change the name of the file.

I've downloaded a similar program I found called Avira, and it is allowing me to run it. It's scanning the computer now and we'll see if it is able to locate the nasty little bugger.

[MrSmiley]

It's either a addon/malware/virus to Firefox specifcally, or an addon/malware/virus on the computer in general with access to multiple areas in the system. Of course you should run virus scanners and be vigilant to be sure it's not the 2nd, but if it's the 1st then there's a couple of things to check: first take a look at TOOLS > ADDONS and make sure there are no addons or plugins installed that you don't know about. If something's identifying itself as a legitimate browser helper object (BHO) then it's really easy to turn off usually. Second, the problem should go away if you create a new profile (run "firefox.exe -profilemanager"), try that and see if the google results are fixed... if so then your problem is isolated in the firefox profile. Likewise a reinstall of firefox itself *may* fix the problem.

or it may not, it looks like a few of these infect the system and go after multiple browsers.

Finally a quick google for "firefox google hijack" turns up all kinds of results, though no one program/issue is responsible for all the results. Most of the websites are recommending running standard AV and registry/malware checking tools such as HijackThis and Combofix.