NASTY bit of spyware
Jim P a dos What you saw was a restore from the recovery console - which looks like a dos prompt. The commands are similar. One way of getting to the recovery...
HOW TO: Start the System Restore Tool from a Command Prompt in Windows XP The information in this article applies to: a.. Microsoft Windows XP Professional b.. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition This article...
wouldn't it have been quicker to just take a hammer to it. (format and reinstall winxp)
How about a system restore - that restores the homepage and gets rid of any plugins, and removes start entries from the registry. I had a really vicious bit of broken spyware in the win98 days that caused me to be unable to access the web from any browser! After 2 nights no sleep, I had even tried reinstalling windows over windows. In the end(still without sleep) I started to find solutions. One was to delete the registry files, then reinstall windows. (since just reinstalling windows didn't replace the registry!!!) That worked. So I decided to infect myself again to find a better solution. Turned out that it could be fixed in 2 minutes (rather than 2 nights of no sleep) with scanreg from dos.
What I don't like about hijack this - and maybe they changed it since - is that you can't select loads of items at the same time and restore them. You have to restore them one at a time.
I know that fixing it without reinstalling is more of a challenge, but there are other more intellectually interesting challenges to do. Fixing computers is the least pleasurable challenge to undertake. Programming is more fun. Or - I'd rather be investigating the 'kernel debugger' option in the XP startup menu. It's also a less stressful form of challenge, and less mind numbing.