What a Tangled Web I Wove

By Monday morning I thought again of Glenn. I called him, but he had to work on his own time and couldn't come over until the following Sunday. Yikes! That was a week away, and my daughter was home for only two weeks before heading off to another camp. And what if there were a terrorist alert downtown and I had to work from home? A week seemed like a very long time. But I trust Glenn, so I agreed.

By Tuesday the problem had worsened. I could not get to any Web page. Windows Internet Explorer would only take me to a blank page. The lower left-hand corner flashed the ominous "badurl.grandstreetinteractive.com." Even I knew that wasn't a good sign. At work I plugged the URL into a Google search and felt relieved to discover a site where dozens of folks were complaining about the same thing and asking for suggestions. One said he had gotten rid of the problem by going to www.grandstreetinteractive.com and following the "uninstall" instructions.

I went to the site. It looked legitimate. I clicked "About Us" and this appeared: "Grand Street Interactive enables users to extend the effectiveness of their Web experience and is headquartered in New York City. Our management team consists of experienced Internet professionals whose shared passion is to transform the way people experience the Web." Well, the last part was certainly true. But I didn't know it would transform the experience into a bad one. I've since tried to contact the human beings behind Grand Street Interactive to quiz them about that "badurl," but haven't been able to locate them, in New York City or anywhere else.

I printed out the instructions and spent hours that evening trying to rid my PC of whatever had taken hold of it. The uninstall didn't work. Earlier in the day, another Washington Post tech named Michael Ramey -- Glenn's boss, actually -- said my problem sounded like spyware and suggested I try installing anti-spyware programs I could download for free from the Web -- Ad-Aware, Spy Sweeper and one program whose name especially appealed to me, Spybot-Search & Destroy.

I explained to Michael that I now couldn't get onto the Web but that he might download the programs and e-mail them to me at home. But when I turned on my computer that night, my e-mail no longer worked, either. Messages told me I didn't have an account, that the right "POP server" couldn't be found. Constant noises were coming from the computer, indicating something was hard at work in there, even though I had few programs running. Soon the Internet browser and e-mail icons on the screen began to mutate -- into fuzzy carbon copies of themselves.

Michael downloaded the anti-spyware programs onto a disk and gave it to me at work the next day.

I installed the programs Wednesday night, hopeful that I might fix this on my own. They ferreted out lots of bad stuff but had no better luck than I in killing it -- software, the computer informed me, couldn't be deleted while running. It was maddening.

I went into safe mode armed with the names of the programs the anti-spyware had identified and tried to manually delete them. Rather than die, they shut down the machine. By now I was crazed, and I half expected to hear the voice of Hal, the renegade computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," come from my screen.

I wondered if maybe some of the programs I was trying to kill weren't really spyware but something essential to Windows that I shouldn't try to delete. I called Microsoft and was passed from operator to operator as I asked where I could find a list of legitimate Microsoft applications so I would know what to kill and what to leave alone. But the only response I got from one person after another -- most of them in foreign tech-support centers like those in India I had been reading so much about lately -- was that I needed to go to Microsoft's online sales. After 45 minutes of this, I hung up. Then I gave up. I actually stood up and walked away from my computer.

Glenn was my last hope. He arrived on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. and didn't leave until 9:30 p.m. Eventually he cleaned up enough so the computer could connect to the Internet correctly. But there were problems still. He would have to come back. Glenn had also established with near certainty why I had a problem: I had switched to a high-speed connection several months before, after the slowness of a dial-up hook-up became too infuriating. But I hadn't installed that firewall. Intruders had unloaded what most certainly was a combination of spyware and viruses onto my machine.