Fast removal of Adload_r.AKC pop up trojan

This is not a tech support web site, but I have been involved in computers and software for many years and normally resolve my own software problems, or know how to find a solution. I was recently infected with a virus and had great difficulty in removing it. I read numerous support forums and found other people that had the same virus. I followed their lead and loaded lots of different anti-virus and adware software and none of them would remove the virus. The virus was particularly annoying as it would regularly pop up new browser windows with sites that I had not requested. This was very counter productive when you are trying to work in a web browser. Finally I came across the solution below, which resolved the problem in seconds and 24 hours later I have had no unwanted pop ups and none of my scans report any errors. So if this can be of any use to you please use it. I will add further tips if I come across anything that I think will be useful.

AVG Free Adload_r.AKC trojan Google Redirect Virus Fix
Last Updated: 8/27/10

I recently ran into an infected laptop where I cleaned up a bunch of spyware and viruses and then I installed AVG Free. I ran a scan with AVG free and it immediately found a trojan in memory, adload_r.akc. It had infected explorer.exe and svchost.exe. I could not find any indication of infection anywhere else of with any other anti-virus program. After searching the internet and finding lots of people with this virus and NO solutions I started getting skeptical of ever removing this trojan.

Then I found this article:

How to Remove Google Redirect Virus
http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/66090.aspx

The article above points you to the Win32/Olmarik removal tool from eset.com. It is located on their removal tool page:
http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2372

Here is the direct link to the removal tool as well:
http://download.eset.com/special/EOlmarikRemover.exe

Running this tool showed that I was infected and it removed the threat in just a few seconds. I rebooted and ran the tool again to confirm the virus was gone. I then ran AVG and no threats were found!!

Windows crashes with Blue Screen & indicates watchdog.sys fault

Once again I suffered a recurrent problem this week and again I trolled through heaps of forums before finding an answer. I also ran lots of virus checks and Anti-Spyware tests, as well as loading heaps of updates. The problem was Windows (in my case XP SP3, but from the forums I understand this happens with later versions too) would crash with a Blue Screen, the error messages would indicate a driver error and list watchdog.sys as a culprit, along with a memory address and date stamp. I hadn’t actually noticed, but this was occurring every time a ran a video in a browser. Well I found the answer on the www.geekstogo.com forum. I take no credit for the solution, I just wanted to put it out there so that anyone else that has the problem has a chance of finding the solution sooner rather than later. Our thanks go to Larrybrains member of the www.geekstogo.com forum.

I would just like to add that I believe I solved my problem, even though it would appear nobody on this forum cares. It seems like it was a problem with Flash. The crashes were happening while streaming video. I disabled hardware acceleration on flash videos. To do this, open a Youtube video, right click on it, go to settings, and then uncheck “enable hardware acceleration” and then close it. DONE. This should apply the setting from now on and you shouldn’t have to do this on any other video ever again and it does not seem to affect performance of the playback, load times and what have you.

I followed the above instructions a couple of days ago and have not had a single crash since and have had no other problems streaming videos.

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