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Originally Posted by SameOldStory
"The last virus that bit was a Word Macro virus on a floppy from my then boss,"
Interestingly the company I work for actually puts, what is basically, a browser hijacker on our laptops. I can get rid of it, but every time we log on to the company's network it gets added back on to the laptop. What does it do? It makes our home page the companies main trashy web site. 
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That's a fairly standard practice. When you log on to the corporate network, you authenticate to a domain, and a login script is run that can set up various things like mapped drives on servers. It sounds like yours is adding a registry tweak to set IE's home page. No hijacker software is required. Just an update to the place where the browser stores what the home page is.
I've seen setups where attaching to the network forces a virus scan on the machine, and for good reason. At a previous employer, I once spent several days helping to clean out a virus infection that got in from an infected laptop plugged into the network at the office. There were firewalls and proxy, A/V and malware scanners on the servers, so we didn't worry about folks picking up something nasty while accessing the Internet from in the office, but once an infected machine was in the office, it had bypassed those protections.
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We're limited to what we can install on the laptops so the best way to get around it is with Google Chrome on a USB drive. But that's a nuisance so I just gave up.
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If my option for stuff the company supplied was IE, I
would install something else on a USB drive. There a good portable Firefox implementation meant for such cases. It would be simple self-defense as a security precaution, as well as preserving my sanity in dealing with the browser.
But I wouldn't bother trying to defeat a home page setting. It's not enough of a problem to be worth a lot of effort, and it
is the company's machine.
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Dennis