[BeeCeeBee]

The following is a copy of a post in the malware removal forum that was written by starbuck, one of our Malware Removal Specialists. It is important information and worthy of posting here as well.

HijackThis is a utility that produces a listing of certain settings found in your computer.
It will scan your registry and various other files for entries that are similar to what a Spyware or Hijacker program would leave behind.
The limitations of this program are:

• It hasn't been updated in a long time, so a lot of rootkits can be hidden from it quite easily and may even stop it from running.
  
• It has limitations in that it can only remove the registry entries that it shows.
  
• It can't remove files, folders etc.
  
• It can't enumerate 64bit systems very well at all.
  
• The report is very basic.

OTL can be used to both scan a system and run fixes on it. The output of the standard scans is in a format similar to that of HijackThis but is a lot more detailed.
The advantages of this program are:

• It's regularly updated to account for new malware variants.
  
• We can remove anything in the reports... Registry entries, files, folders, drivers, services etc.
  
• Is designed to run on 64bit systems as well as 32bit systems.
  
• The reports can be as short or as detailed as we want them to be.

In short, OTL not only gives us the information we need.... it also gives us the means to remove whatever we find.
This enables us to help you more quickly.