OT: Help needed with modem dialer.

Whistle
1

Even though I used to make my living with PCs, comm was never my specialty. I’m having what may be a problem and was hoping some at C&F could help.

Lately, when I’m off line, my dialer (Microsoft Win ME) keeps wanting to start up and call home, so to speak. The dialer window will pop up at odd times, often with ridiculous frequency. This might be while doing anything from reading mail offline, to typing a letter, to playing a game having nothing at all to do with external communications. I hit the ‘cancel’ button and it goes away, only to return - often within minutes.

I’ve downloaded and run both Spybot and WebWasher, and I run both every few days, but still this keeps happening. It almost seems as if something wants to call home. I can’t see any such contact, but of course I’m no naive enough to think that something clandestine would obligingly report itself to Windows.

Anyone know what’s happening and how I can kill it?

Thanks

2

Instructions how to fix that particular problem are here.

HTH

:slight_smile:

3

I had this happen once or twice. Try downloading Adaware. I think that’s what finally cleared it out for me.

Good luck!
Tery

4

Apparently there is a background process that is attempting to dial out. To state the obvious, I assume your mail client isn’t running. Bring up the Task Manager with CTRL-ALT-DEL and identify the running processes, one of those may likely be the culprit. Kill the suspect process and see if the problem goes away. If it does, next you’ll have to determine how the process starts: spawned by an application, on boot, etc. Some places to look for startup apps are the win.ini file (edit out the startup line), the Startup folder on the Start button (delete the shortcut), and the Registry (use Regedit to locate and remove the entry).