I was about to reformat, but then I discovered that Win2000 doesn't exactly give ya any easy way to do so...on the advice of my guitarist (he's a radio talkshow junkie), I checked out Kim Komando web page & found Startpage Guard for free...it's not very intuitive, but it does specialize in this kind of hijacker...even after running it, I still felt compelled to give Spybot & AdAware another run at it as well...for the first time in days, I was able to bring up Comcast home page, & after a reboot, SPG stopped the hijacker in its tracks (I refuse to classify these asswipes as belonging to any higher species)...the biggest obstacle to overcome in these kind of attacks is that most all the freeware available is designed to block the incoming bugs that they recognize more than get them out after the fact, & as jbh3 points out, this was prob a new attack plan that's not gonna be seen as a threat until it's too late...
While one can never be sure, I believe I was likely duped into opening the door for this nasty POS...I was led to believe that this was a codec for a video file...again, we often pay a high toll for cruising the red-light district, even when it's just in cyberspace...

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