I was browsing an unscrupulous site, and the next thing I know is that my homepage has been changed to some porn site. Not only that, but the scumware had somehow made a entry into my gpedit.msc on XP to disable me from changing the homepage back to normal. I had to go into gpedit to change it back.

Now, how the feck can a webpage make changes to my gpedit.msc?

That is some nasty scumware.

Howdy,

This is a big drawback using IE. I never really looked into the problem but I think it is tied into whatever download you may just run. That is the conservative thought. Nasty java or activex can do the same shit.
I am forever removing gator or some other bookmark crap that my wonderful girlfriend manages to pick up while using java games or some other file type crap that needs to be loaded. You know you really have the "BROWSER HERPES" when you cant access your preferences/options to change it back.
(you can change it back, it just takes some effort)

I use spybot to remove all the mal-shit. You can also try ad-aware or whatever it is called.

One good thing about Palladium may be that is stops scumware.

Think about it.

Aquatic, if you did not answer yes to installing or running anything, it did most likely exploit an IE vulnerability to accomplish what it did. Normally, the IE security model will not allow any such changes without proper user confirmation.

I never click 'yes' on those things, so I think you are correct.

May I suggest to d/l that latest security fixes for IE. There has been a number of sploits around the net these days.

Try Mozilla Firebird...