The Path to Zen

The winshow adware

One of my XP machines was affected by winshow/winlink on Sunday. The symptom was that usually when a second IE window almost finished loading a page, an application error would get thrown from a winshow.dll.

Googling with “winshow” returned a surprising number of results. The one I followed to fix my system was from Symantec.

It didn’t end there. It turned out one unique feature my winshow “showed”, while not mentioned by any of the pages I have seen, was that after deleting all the related registries and files, and rebooting the system, winshow and winlink would come back!

A quick glance at the Startup folder revealed a mysterious “MSUpdater.exe” (those perverts didn’t even bother to give it a proper icon!). After removing that file and rebooting, everything came back to normal.

I think I’ll be purchasing a copy of Norton AntiVirus very shortly.