Annoying redirections every time I click on a google link

[BrigitBigKnickers]

That's about it really.

Everytime I do a google search then click on a link it redirects me to a different site. Quite often e-bay. It's like the internet version of hijacking!

When I click on the link a second time it usually goes where I want.

How do I get rid of this it's really annoying.

What Operating System (e.g. Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X) and Broweser (e.g. Internet Explorer 7, Firefox or Safari) are you using?

Assuming that you're running Windows, you might want to download and run malwarebytes.

I am using windows XP and Firefox as my browser

There's some deep techie stuff about similar problems here. You'll probably need to go to a forum with specific expertise in these matters to advise whether it's relevant to your situation.

Do try something like malwarebyes or AdAware (www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php) first though, it might clear things up without needing to get all techy.

Well my DH (quite a computer geek) has tried everything. The virus must be a powerful one as it seems to be able to prevent every virus programme from being downloaded.

Not sure what to do next?

Get your DH to try running ComboFix - Use Instructions - Read the instruction document as it has important info about manually restoring internet connection.
Use of ComboFix is done at your own risk Do a backup of important documents first

When downloading, select Save As and rename the file from ComboFix.exe to Combo-Fix.exe that may be enough to fool the virus if it's checking for you running the anti-virus program. With luck it will find the trojan.

Then run all your other anti-virus/trojan checkers to thoroughly clean the system.

If he can't download anti-virus from Windows then he needs to run something other than Windows. If he's "quite a computer geek" he shouldn't find this too scary?

To be honest, much as I'm a huge Linux advocate, I really don't think CruelAndUnusualParenting's suggestion is necessary yet.

It's totally normal for even the most "wimpy" of infections to prevent access to known anti-virus and anti-malware websites, and to prevent execution of the most popular security tools.

All that is generally required is to download the tools of choice on a clean machine, rename them (a truely "randomname.exe" is actually better than one that still has the first few letters the same as the program you wish to run) and burn them to a cd or use a USB flash drive to get them over to the PC you're trying to fix.

Nannynick's suggestion of combofix is a good one, but that wouldn't be my first line of attack if I were advising someone how to clean their own machine, as it isn't a beginner's tool, imho.

Start with downloading rkill from download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/rkill.com and Malwarebytes: download.bleepingcomputer.com/malwarebytes/mbam-setup.exe (as recommended by CruelAndUnusualParenting, earlier - an excellent free Antimalware program that I cannot recommend highly enough!) and then boot into safe mode (with networking).

Run rkill first and then, without rebooting, install malwarebytes and perform an update and a full scan.

If malwarebytes won't run, get back to me, as rkill should kill most known malicious processes, but certain infections can still require you to rename the malwarebytes core executable, or they may even replace it, requiring you to run another copy of it that you've downloaded separately and renamed.

Let us know how you get on, and if/when you get Malwarebytes to run, allow it to remove everything it finds and reboot into normal (not safe mode) if it says it needs to reboot to complete the cleaning process.

You should then be well on the way to a clean PC, but don't feel that you are completely done yet, as Malwarebytes is definitely one of the very best tools but it can still miss a few things that will be caught by various others that I would recommend running later...

It all sounds pretty complicated but it's not that bad really - honest!