CWShredder is the greatest tool that we've found for easily removing many of the CoolWebSearch adware + browser hijacker. Applications like Ad-Aware and Spybot do not always properly remove this bug. It is truly a nasty one that can be incredibly hard to get rid of. The original build development was by merijn who we all love around here. He's also developed HJT and is just a GREAT help to the fight against spyware. Unfortunately he decided to sell CWShredder and its still a bit too early to see if this is a good thing or not. With so many variants coming out its simply too much work for somebody who was doing it all for free. I'm sure he was well paid for CWShredder and he deserves it!

The cause of CWS infection is due to an exploit in MS Java VM. A MS bulletin about this can be found here. I suggest using Sun's Java VM instead of the one from Microsoft. If you need to uninstall Microsoft's Java VM I have posted the instructions here.

We will still be supporting the last merijn build which you can download here. This is version 1.59.1 which is the last version that I had. If there was another 1.x release please let me know and I'll update my archive.

If you would like to use V2.15 we have it available here.

1.59.1 comes in a .zip file which you simply extract and run the .exe. 44 variants and 5 affiliates are fixed by v1.59.1 Here's a pair of screenshots of what this version looks like:

V 2.15 comes in an exe installer. The only differences I've managed to find is the added support of 1 new variant and a whole lot more commercialization. This is why we still support v 1.59.1 Here's a few screenshots so you can see what the various screens look like in this "new" version. *boo*