Chrome Autostarts and Won't Be Killed.

Do you ever try the groups at news.grc.com for PC questions?

Thanks for the suggestion, but Chrome is not in the autostart list.

I'm not sure what that means. If it hosts newsgroups, wouldn't I be able to view these with any newsreader?

Use Revo uninstaller to remove Chrome. I had the same problem on my uncle's laptop caused by (probably) my grand niece.

Cheers

Start: Run: msconfig. Select Startup tab. uncheck what you don't want to autostart.

You always seem to have issues with your computer, maybe you should hire someone to operate it for you.

The Adware app you had or still have, didn't get there by itself you had to stupidly click on something somewhere.

Anyway, it's obvious you still have code operating that is monitoring the operation of Chrome, if it see's it not there, it'll start it. You better check all of the running code and compare their file names doing a search to see what belongs to who! The Malware remover most likely didn't remove it all.

IT people make lots of money from people like you :)

Jamie

Yes, they have both an NNTP server at news.grc.com and a web interface at grc.com. I specified the news server because I assumed you would use a reader. You don't have to sign up, but the server needs an arbitrary password.

It's probably the best place for PC questions. The groups are very specific but allow crossposts. For example there is:

grc.techtalk grc.techtalk.cryptography grc.techtalk.dns grc.security.wireless grc.security.hardware grc.security.software

They are actually more active than most legacy usenet groups. The groups are loosely moderated by Steve Gibson (grc = Gibson Research Corp) but moderation is very rarely needed.

Thanks. I didn't know there were any other newsgroups than those on the "legacy" servers.

Yes, very helpful. Thanks, I'll look into that. I hate to blame a version of windows, but all this started with this laptop and Win 8. I like to blame it on Lenovo as they did a lot of things that I think are idiotic, but I've been told these are now industry standards... like replacing the Fx keys with special function keys requiring the use of a "Fn" key to get the previous Fx operation and making some of the Cntl key combinations impossible to use, like using Cntl (or maybe Shift) F4 to step through the addressing modes in Excel/LibreOffice row/col addresses. It is a *much* greater PITA to do this manually.

I could go on with my rant against all the problems that are clearly Lenovo related such as the generally difficult to use keyboard, but I'll let it go at that.

One person's "stupidly" is another person's "I don't remember clicking that"! I don't click anything at all suspicious if I see that it is suspicious. They do a lot to disguise things and bundle ad/malware with with perfectly legitimate software these days. I installed Foxit recently and I seem to remember I didn't do that for the longest time because I was warned about malware bundled. I was told if you uncheck all the places they try to insert the crapware you will be ok, but...

I have done that and found nothing out of the ordinary. I guess I'll have to dig some more.

I guess I have a purpose after all. Thanks for the great advice. It's people like you that make newsgroups so great! :)

The weird thing is I didn't have this problem until I unstalled Malwarebytes to get rid of Offers4U. After that Chrome and Firefox would not work. I quit Malwarebytes and got things working ok, but when I rebooted and Malwarebytes was running again the browsers crapped out again. I uninstalled Malwarebytes and got Firefox to run, but Chrome is still a problem.

I can't figure how Malwarebytes is connected to any of this.

Sounds more like Malwarebytes hasn't quite managed to zap the adware completely. Things restarting unbiden is a characteristic of malware.

Try another anti adware product against it and look up details of the exact variant of the thing you downloaded.

Another AV product might find/fix it or a specific remedy for this.

Be careful though - a fair number of the "fix your PC sites" high up the Google list harbour potentially hostile malware and bad advice :(

I have seen this happen where the malware creates an official windows "cron" job type event ("scheduled task"?), to restart itself every few minutes.

I would have thought that Google, being Google, would have helpfully saved all that stuff in the "cloud" for you :)

I am glad I could help!

Jamie