Hello everyone,
A while back in this post I wrote about the plague of malicious toolbars, browser hijackers, browser add-ons, and browser extensions. One of the most prominent of these insidious, unwanted programs is a little gem called Conduit.
Conduit is a browser hijacker, which is promoted via other free downloads, and once installed will add the Conduit Toolbar which will change your browser homepage and default search engine to search.conduit.com.
Conduit Search will display advertisements and sponsored links in your search results, and may collect search terms from your search queries. The Conduit infection is used to boost advertising revenue, as in the use of blackhat SEO, to inflate a site’s page ranking in search results.
Conduit it’s technically not a virus, but it does exhibit plenty of malicious traits, such as rootkit capabilities to hook deep into the operating system, browser hijacking, and in general just interfering with the user experience. The industry generally refers to it as a “PUP,” or potentially unwanted program.
Many times after I remove Conduit, I get the following RunDLL “Error loading…” message on boot up:
c:\users\ed\appData\local\conduit\backgroundcontainer\background container.dll
This is because a Conduit orphaned registry entry still remains (even after removal), and is telling Windows to load the file upon boot up.
Here is the fix:
1. Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools.
2. Open Task Scheduler and click on Task Scheduler Library.
3. Look through the list for an entry related to BackgroundContainer.
4. If found, right-click on it and select Delete.
5. Exit all programs and reboot the computer when done.
Professor Randy says: Be extra cautious when downloading third-party browser add-ons, extensions, plugins, toolbars, browser helper objects, and generally most software. Conduit may “come along for the ride”.
4:36 pm on January 7th, 2014 1
Thanks for the advice it worked perfectly.
9:07 am on January 12th, 2014 2
works great -thanks someone should report them to someone that monitors scam
10:12 am on January 18th, 2014 3
Thanks bro. Spot on
12:08 pm on January 24th, 2014 4
Thank you! I just fixed the backgroundcontainer error (due to the conduit virus). All the best!
12:16 am on January 26th, 2014 5
Awesome! Thank you VERY much for posting this info!
5:57 pm on January 26th, 2014 6
Multumesc! A functionat perfect.
O intrebare: Cum apare acest asa-zis virus?
9:26 am on February 1st, 2014 7
Worked great! Thanks for the help.
2:53 pm on February 2nd, 2014 8
Perfect! Thanks a lot!
11:12 am on February 15th, 2014 9
This worked and I’m very happy to be rid of the Conduit error every time I startup my P.C. I’ve been searching for a long time now & have tried a few other suggestions also a few ideas of my own to no avail. Thank You!
4:26 pm on February 16th, 2014 10
Thank you so much for your help. Bless your HEART!
6:42 pm on March 18th, 2014 11
Randy is the “MAN”… Thanks for the info…It worked!
10:27 am on March 26th, 2014 12
Great help sir
i thought to re install my window due to this error.
really helpful
Thanx
7:54 am on April 12th, 2014 13
Brilliant! Thanks so much!
3:11 am on May 17th, 2014 14
Hi,
I’ve been trying to do the same thing but I can’t find it in the task scheduler. Any ideas.
7:49 pm on May 19th, 2014 15
I went through a long and apparently successful process of getting rid of malware, but in the process, I started getting this “BackgroundContainer.dll not found” message on startup, so I deleted the indicated item from “Task Scheduler Library.” However, I am still getting the message on startup. What do I do?
1:28 pm on August 19th, 2014 16
Worked great and the best thing is I learned more more on how to disable and clean up maleware. Thanks Prof
12:26 pm on August 25th, 2014 17
I had 2 of these errors. I removed the BackgroundContainer from the startup. It got rid of 1 of my errors, but I still have one. Do you know how I get rid of the second error? There is no longer an entry regarding it in the task scheduler.
12:26 pm on August 25th, 2014 18
I had 2 of these errors. I removed the BackgroundContainer from the startup. It got rid of 1 of my errors, but I still have one. Do you know how I get rid of the second error? There is no longer an entry regarding it in the task scheduler?
12:45 pm on November 29th, 2014 19
Thank you very much!! Worked perfectly.