A friend of mine is running Win ME with IE6 and his pc seems to have a 'phishing' trojan. On accessing IE a window superimposes itself on top of his normal IE home page but doesn't cover it entirely. It's asking for bank details etc. and is obviously bogus. Nothing else on the pc can be accessed when the window is visible. The window cannot be minimised, moved or shut down in the normal way. The only way of getting rid of it is to use ctrl/alt/delete and then highlight 'Security Warning' and shut it down. IE then closes immediately and can then be re-opened normally without the 'phishing' window appearing.

This 'Security Warning' is not present when the pc starts up and only appears on the first start up of IE after the pc has booted up. I've run a virus scan, AdAware, Hijack This and SpyBot with no success. I assume that this annoyance has somehow embedded itself into IE. I'd be very grateful for any advice as to how to get rid of this.

Thanks in advance.

Make sure youve got the latest security updates for IE6 from windows update... and then install a decent browser like firefox

You could try Microsoft's Antispyware software, or if there are any details shown on screen, stick them into Google to see what comes up.

Your friend might want to consider using another browser (firefox?) to browse with, until they know IE is clean again...

Sounds like a right pain - I can't see anything obvious via google from the description you've given, but you can bet others have encountered this and posted a solution somewhere...

Thanks for advice. I've done what you both suggested and installed Firefox - everything seems OK but I found, to my horror, that he didn't have a firewall so I've also installed Zone Alarm. Still a bit worried that something might be lurking but keep fingers crossed!