Don’t you find it annoying when a contact (its a computer, not the real person sending you the link) sends you a link that looks perfectly realistic and you download it to find it’s actually a messenger “virus”.

I was a victim of one today and they are absolutely mind boggling. You don’t initially know they are what they are, but when you do they are enough to send you insane.

I had one of the most annoying ones today. You may want to know this as a warning. If you get a link from someone saying the following:

foto http://site.facebooky.net/ and then what looks like an image link with your email address on the end, do NOT open the link or download the attached file.

It’s one that spams all your contacts with the same link but with their email address, and then freezes your mouse so their is nothing you can do about it. When it’s finished driving all your friends mad with spam links, it hands the mouse back for 5 minutes, and then repeats itself again.

In the end I decided all I could do was wait until it wanted to spam everyone again, and then turn off the wifi adapter so it couldnt send any messages. Once it decided it couldn’t send anything and handed the mouse back, I checked the task manager for suspicious files.

One file in particular caught my eye: fxstaller.exe

A quick Google search found that this was the file causing the problem, and that many other people were having the same issue.

The file hides itself away in C:/Windows and although Windows reports it being there, it wont show up since its hidden. The best way i decided to kill it was (in Windows Vista) open up the start menu, search fxstaller.exe (but NOT pressing Enter) and when the file was listed, right click it and delete. And that ended my woes.

If you have the issue, that’s how you fix it.