WARNING: Beach Islands Screensaver

[ADAM Web Design]

Having encountered this myself just today, and having been inspired by faglork's warning post earlier, I thought it would be a good idea to warn others as well.

Claria is distributing a "free", ad-supported Beach Islands Screensaver (Bi1Helper.exe is the file in question). And, like most Claria products, it can be tricky to remove.

If you encounter it, the following set of instructions should help get rid of it:

1) Uninstall both Beach Islands Screensaver and GAIN from Add/Remove Programs.

2) Run Ad-Aware and remove anything related to GAIN or Claria.

3) Run HijackThis! and remove anything containing "GMT" or "Bi1Helper.exe".

The whole process should take about half an hour (although it took me about 2 to figure it out.)

[MuNKyonline]

Cheers Adam, hopefully I wont come across it but i'll try out your method if I do =)

[kgun]

There are two tricks you should know of if you use Windows XP.

1. Reset the computer to yesterday. It does not delete documents and files that you have made.

2. Run + msconfig

Uncheck the program from startup if it has instlled itself there.

3. In worst case, start the computer in safe mode and manually remove it from the registers

run + regedit + KW'search.

You must know what you are doing.

4. Some even do not know that you have do shut down a process

Ctrl + Alt + Del

in order to remove a program.

5. Use advanced uninstaller

http://www.innovative-sol.com/

that I have never used myself.

Resetting the computer takes 10 minutes and is best.

[davebarnes]

I don't understand what all the fuss is about.
I went to the Claria website and tried to download the Beach islands screensaver and could not.

It said I needed some browsers I had never heard of such as: Internet Explorer. I use Firefox.

,dave

[DrTandem1]

Screensavers and emoticons are probably the two most common Trojan Horses.

[encoder]

I didn't know that screensavers are trojans. I think they are just hosts for trojans to ride on. I currently have 2 downloaded screensavers from freeze.com. Do I have trojan in my computer system that I don't know?