The odl one
 

The old one you gave has ads. I opened it and an ad came up. Now i'm scared. And I mean really scared!

Go to the Windows Control Panel,
open Internet Options,
go to the Security tab,
click on Restricted Sites,
click on the Sites button,
and add www.bearshare com to that list.


It was just a typical Fastclick popup. Completely harmless.
It wasn't even in BearShare, just on their web site.

If you got one of those ubiquitous Fastclick popups your spam protection must
be pretty weak. Time to get some more tools, I think.

For starters unzip this to C:\Windows\system32\drivers\ETC: HOSTS.zip

Some of BearShare's windows actually display pages on the BearShare.com website.
It's all quite harmless and easy to block, as described above.

What do I do? I am still crying afraid I have spyware and adware on my computer.

Did you follow the instructions I gave you?
If so go back to the Internet Options and hit the Delete Files button on the General tab.

What will happen after I delete the files?

That simply clears the browser cache. If any popup ads were in there they are now gone.

Pop up wont come up never ever again?

That's the plan, if you added www.bearshare.com to the Restricted Sites Zone.

What if you take off bearshare the program off of my computer. Would pop up still come up even the the program is removed?

I haven't thoroughly investigated this yet, but something is fvcked about this HOSTS file...what exactly it is, I'm not sure as I haven't bothered to open it up in a text editor and investigate, BUT this thing is indeed totally and undeniably fvcked...what it does is uses up your cpu @ 50%, which not only slows down the system to molasses on a freezing winter night and heats the sucker to its limits, but also cripples any internet connectivity to the point of being useless....it took me a while to just figure out what process to kill via taskmanager (svchost.exe NETWORK SERVICE (there are two, one instance can be observed to be increasings its cpu usage to infinity)), and about a week to finally remember and thus figure out that I had put this hosts file on my box a week ago today, but it hadn't started showing its effects 'til Monday when I started up the system after shutting down Sunday night...

in a nutshell, anybody downloading and using this hosts file after reading the above, my experience with this particular hosts file, is stoopid...

There is a known bug with one of the Windows XP services. It's pretty rare but
sometimes the "DNS Client" service gets plugged up.

To prevent future lockups go to the Administrative Tools in Control Panel, open
the Services app and set the DNS Client service to Manual. Stop it if it is running.

Usually I leave a note about this in that zip file but I was in a hurry and forgot this time. :rolleyes: