"Could not find file of domains"

HolmPC

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Apr 14, 2011
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18,510
Today I saw a laptop with the following problem. When using any browser to view certain pages, including the google homepage, the text "Could not find file of domains" was shown in the top left of the page, and in some cases (for example the gmail interface) it was in a few other page elements too.

When I viewed the page source, the top left one appeared to be plain text in the page header.

I've googled this and come up with a few pages, non in English, and none explaining what would cause this. It doesn't appear to be causing any issues, but it worries me that it's so undocumented and I'd like to find out more about it. Does anyone know what causes it?
 

HolmPC

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2011
4
0
18,510
To help anyone else who may be seeing the same thing (the reports in forums and across the web are rare, and seem to be non-english language) I wanted to post how I solved this issue.

After running a number of spyware and malware tools and finding and deleting a number of PUPs, a combination of RKill and RogueKiller detected a process "double-city.exe" and a service called "Dam Bam". Removing both of these threats and rebooting solved the problem, and I no longer saw the message at the top of browser pages.

As there was a variety of malware present, I wouldn't like to guarantee which was the culprit, but the problem was certainly solved by malware removal.

As an aside, I also saw an odd home page of www.%20snf%20.com in Firefox. This was fixed by removing the parameter from the end of the target of the Firefox shortcut.