Yesterday, our home PC acted strangely after my wife downloaded something from a China web site, basically there is always an Ad bar at the top of Internet Explorer (something like the picture below, full size pic here).

To fight against the ad bar, I did the following: upgrade the IE to 7. That did not solve the problem. I also looked the new files under “Program Files”, “Windows”, just by looking at the date. I did find a DLL named twkdtsdjdrqdp.dll, but I could not remove it. Did the “regedit”, before the install of IE 7. All these did not work, and we are both upset about that.

Finally my wife did this google search “IE 最顶端有广告栏怎么办”, and we found the solution at this article. The article is in Chinese (I bet probablly because this problem is more common in China). Basically we go to IE Tools => Internet Options => Programs => Manage Add-ons, sort the Add-on by publisher, we saw the unnamed publishers at the top (those are suspects). We found the 1st one being twkdtsdjdrqdp.dll. So we disabled this Add-on. I also went to “.\Windows\System32″ to rename the file to xxx.txt (still could not remove it because it’s being loaded). After that we are good to go.

(Disable Ad ware DLL inside IE, full size pic here)

Why the Ad bar

I looked at thse Ad bar, it’a basically a bunch link to google ad. I believe the author tried to allure people to click on the ads to make money. Another variant of this ad ware is it says “Your IE has security hole” and asks you to download a Google pisaca software”, again the author is trying to making referral fees from Google.

I think the prevalence of those kind of ad bar in China, in a way tells how competitive online ad business is in China.