Conduit - a Potentially Unwanted Program
I had an interesting experience when I found that web pages were loading very slowly, if at all, on my computer. I tried loading the same pages on my iPad and found that they loaded normally.
Conduit in computer speak as a PUP, or a Potentially Unwanted Program. It Hijacks your Browsers and infects the computer's registry. You will know that there is something wrong when you are trying to access a web page and you get messages telling you that the page isn't loading, and asks if you want to kill the page or wait. If you click on wait the page eventually loads. Once loaded is seems to behave normally.
Conduit is often bundled with Freeware programs. If you download and install Freeware programs read every screen very carefully and click decline on any programs that you don't want installed, particularly Conduit.
If you find your computer showing the symptoms I described above Google search "pcsmarties + conduit, and you will find a very detailed solution to the problem. The solutions includes deleting an Conduit related programs, cleaning out any registry links, and blocking any potential cookies in each of your browsers.
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Coming from a Geek, That's all pretty accurate info. Conduits mainly come from the freeware and are not usually caught by antiviruses. Getting rid of them can be a pain as well.
A very common one lately is the search.conduit.com that changes your home page to look like google's home page. It'll be almost identical, except it'll have advertisements and it'll say 'search.conduit.com/**' in the address bar.
The only real way to get rid of it is to uninstall it and then remove all the traces in your app data. That means showing all hidden folders, going into your user folder and physically deleting anything with 'conduit' in the name
Thanks StarKodomo . It was search.conduit.com . I found so good detailed instructions using Google . It had infected both Firefox and Chrome and had had massively infected the registry. It took an hour or so to work through the fix. It seems to have worked well as I haven't had any problems for the last week.
Good to hear you got rid of it! Like I said, that one is a pretty common one nowadays. It's not so much malicious as it is annoying. It does do some damage to the registry as well. Make sure you just get rid it in the app data or it may come back. Traces tend to linger there.