CWS-ish post

I don't remember why I didn't used to like overwriting (in DOS) Notepad.exe
with a renamed Editpad executable, rather than just running it as Editpad -
but in XP I finally got fed up with the system choosing Notepad even when
I've reassigned it as viewer of, eg .INIs, such as when you edit Boot.ini
from System Properties. There are too many occassions this sort of thing
occurs - eg it's well known you need something like Bill James' script for
assigning your choice as default source viewer, even after you've selected
it in Internet Options (although if they finally stopped the truly awful
Office HTML Editor taking over, or better still strangled it then thrown it
in the canal...but I digress...).

So, in my FAT32 installation of XP I booted to MS-DOS 8.00 and overwrote
Notepad.exe in Windows, System32 and DLLCache. Rebooted and fine, a real
text editor is now default. For the NTFS installation on the next partition,
it's a different story - so I fired up the Partition Magic File Browser and
did the replacing from where I was. I forget exactly why I initially put a
copy in the root - but I did. That was two, three weeks ago. I forgot about
it.

Today I do a scan with Spybot S&D and it reports the corrupted file -
C:\NotePad.exe (which I recall spelling that way) - as being
CoolWebSeach.Smartsearch-something-or-over!

So I do a scan with Ad-aware (the old one) and it finds nothing bar the
usual MRUs. AVG, Stinger (new one out 1st May) and Sysclean all pass it too.
Cwshredder also finds CoolWebSeach.Smartsearch! Only in Scan Only mode it
apparently doesn't say where or what it found it in. So, selecting to delete
to Recycle Bin I tell it to 'Fix' - only in Fix mode it reports the system
as clean!

At last, I guess, Spybot and CWShredder share the *same* weakness. I'm not
surprised about Spybot FPing - though lately I choose it over Ad-aware
without hesitation - but I am surprised that CWShredder is this weak. If
anyone puts that down to Trend Micro taking it over, well, their Sysclean is
very good and has always been far superior to McAfee's Stinger (just about
10x as large, thus useless for those on dial-up). PC-Cillin is a deep shade
of crap though, so you never can Chuck, I guess.


Shane