dialer.exe

I'm upgrading a friends computer and came across an icon on the desktop called Celebrity, which is a shortcut to dialer.exe.(C:\liveshows). Dialer.exe is a program used to call 900 numbers for **** etc. He thinks it may have got installed with a game years ago. The big problem is that you can't remove it. I've deleted it several times and it just reappears in its entirety the next time the computer is booted up. I've done a little research on this and found that you have to delete a file called FASTFIND.EXE so it won't come back but there is not a file with that name on this computer. I've been through the registry and msconfig and there is nothing I can find to help me. Has anyone else experienced this and know a cure short of formatting?

 

http://www.cexx.org/liveshow.htm

 

Been there and done that....It still comes back eveytime you boot up.

 

Have you looked for it in msconfig?

You could also do a search in the registry for liveshow or dialer.exe or celebrity and delete the entry or entries, just be sure you have a good backup of the registry first, just in case.

 

And FASTFIND.EXE is an applet that shipped as part of MS Office. Did some drive indexing to speed up file location/access. It was a major horror though and most folks I know of removed it pretty quickly.

If it was there at one time, there will probably be a control panel icon for it.

 

Try running Ad-Aware, then scouring the usual startup locations and deleting any suspect entries.

 

Got it

Going through msconfig I found "System Tasks" that pointed to a file/program called filez.exe. That is the one that kept loading the program at bootup. I've deleted it and the problem is gone.

Thanks for everyones help!!!

 

filez.exe is an old Win3.x utility. 1991/2 or somewhere in that range. Probably nothing you really needed at this point.

From Here

Only real questions I'd have are where did it come from and how did it recently get added to your startup?

 

Newt

First off, it is not my computer.
Researching it on the internet came up with a few possibilities, the main one being that it comes attached to some games that are downloaded from the net. The other is that it can be downloaded from visiting some **** sites or through newsgroups.

What is tricky is that it will put a self executing program in your root directory that will reload the program if it detects that you have deleted it. It puts the program in your start up so it fires up everytime you boot up.

Some web sites said that the file was named fastfind.exe and you had to remove it along with the diectory "liveshow" which contained dialer.exe (there is a fastfind file in Microsoft's Office program, but this is a different one.) That info came from http://www.cexx.org/liveshow.htm

This program named the file filez.exe and called it a system task in msconfig so as not to be detected.

I'm glad I found it before we decided to format.

 

mojo13 - thanks for the info. And I am glad you found it as well.

Sounds like that is some rude code. I really hate it when the stuff tries to take over without even asking if that is what you (the user) want.