Computer Registry Settings and Spyware Programs

Spyware programs are insidious little programs that sneak onto your system and transmit your surfing habits (and other personal information) back to the server that spawned them. By their very nature, spyware is meant to be hard to detect and hard to uninstall. If your Internet Explorer home page has suddenly been changed, and you can't change it to a different page, chances are you're the victim of a particularly nasty form of spyware called a browser hijacker. Browser hijackers actually alter your registry settings to disable Internet Explorer options.