Forums mIRC Help I need some help.

I'm new to the IRC thing, so if you want to fill me in on that I'd appreciate that too, but what I came to ask anyone was that a program called mIRC(and xIRC before) keep showing up on my Add or Remove Programs. When I click the button to remove, all I get is a little window that only shows Retry and Exit. Retry doesn't do anything, and I would really like to get rid of it, maybe cause I don't know anything about it. For some reason, my computer slows up when they show up, so I think it's better off without them. Am I in the right place to be asking, and if I am, could you please help me out. Appreciate it, PEACE

Sorry read the Welcome after I wrote this LOL. I use Windows XP and DSL, only for a short while, and I have all my firewalls turned off cause they interfere with my online gaming. I think that's all yall asked me to post, but for right now that's all I can remember. PEACE

Hey there, and welcome to the mIRC message boards

Firstly, just to say that IRC means Internet Relay Chat. It's a protocol that you can connect to with an IRC client such as mIRC. There are other IRC clients out there. More info can be found in the IRC FAQ section.

If you have mIRC installed on your computer and you did not install it, and you cannot uninstall it, then it is very likely that you are infected with some sort of virus or trojan. A lot of trojans use mIRC to connect 'GT Bots' (Global Threat Bots) to IRC networks. These bots can then be used to spam and attack people, servers or websites. Each GT Bot exists because someone on the Internet is infected, thousands of people are doing this with absolute no knowledge. More info on GT Bots can be found here.

To get rid of it you'll need to run 2-3 virus/trojan scans. No ONE virus scanner can detect everything. It can be annoying, but you need to download and install several antiviruses, update them, and then run them. A full system scan with several antiviruses/anti-trojans could take 2+ hours. Please see this thread for lots of resources. I recommend SwatIT! and The Cleaner for GT Bot removal. Make sure you also run the Housecall online scan.

Firewalls are a good way to prevent people exploiting your computer through open ports. I couldn't help you set up your firewall with your games, however, you should contact the game manufacturer (or go to the website of the game community) and find out what ports need to be open, then open those ports in your firewall and have it enabled.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

As of right now the page for downloading SwatIt aren't working so I have to try again later. For now I'm gonna go in and see if I can at least find some of the files that were talked about. I don't need this man . I just got rid of some kind of Sasser worm that I get everytime I reinstall my OS, but I'm not worried about that anymore. That didn't slow my computer down, but this thing slows it down tremendously. You're sure those are the only ways to get rid of it? Thanks for the help, hopefully I can get rid of it without going crazy. PEACE

Those are the only recommended ways, and the only recommended way we can give, as there are different variants of GT bots, and we don't know which one you have. Even then, a manual removal would involve editing the registry which is not a good idea, because if you delete the wrong key by accident you could end up breaking your computer, possibly permanently. Programs specially made for that purpose can remove them automatically and safely.

For me, the SwatIT! download link works fine, there are other links though to virus scanners/trojan scanners. The Cleaner is another good trojan scanner.

Regards,

Yeh I don't mess with the manually removing stuff. I trust programs more than myself when it comes to that. Another thing I'm seeing is that many pictures are not coming up on the other forum that I post on. A lot of guys avatars are not loading up, but the SwatIt link is the page not working so far. I can use your link, but not the link that I click when i decide which one to get. Don't know why, and I hope it's not this thing i have, I'll try to use the cleaner right now. PEACE