This page shows how to remove us-u.openx.net from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Did you just interrupt your work because you noticed us-u.openx.net in your browser’s status bar? You are not alone. I also got the us-u.openx.net status bar message while browsing. Please read on…
Here is us-u.openx.net in my network log:
As you can see in the Referrer field, it appeared while I searched at Google.
The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for us-u.openx.net…
- Transferring data from us-u.openx.net…
- Looking up us-u.openx.net…
- Read us-u.openx.net
- Connected to us-u.openx.net…
If you also see this on your machine, you almost certainly have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the us-u.openx.net domain appear in your browser. Don’t blame the people that owns the website you were at when you first spotted us-u.openx.net in the status bar. They are probably not responsible, but from the potentially unwanted program that’s running on your system. I’ll try help you to remove the us-u.openx.net status bar messages in this blog post.
For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I have been following the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of adverts, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program auto-updates, or if it installs additional software on the machines. I first found us-u.openx.net in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.
us-u.openx.net was registered on 1996-11-09. us-u.openx.net resolves to 173.241.242.220. openads.com and openads.org is also located on the same IP.
So, how do you remove us-u.openx.net from your browser? On the machine where us-u.openx.net showed up in the status bar I had YouTubeAdBlocke, SalePlus and IStart 5.3.7 installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from us-u.openx.net.
The issue with status bar notifications like the one described in this blog post is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.
Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the us-u.openx.net removal:
The first thing I would do to remove us-u.openx.net is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Do you see something strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started observing the us-u.openx.net status bar messages.
The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often appear under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to identify and uninstall the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. It’s a tool built to manually track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve found the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.
FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having difficulties deciding if a file is legitimate or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:
Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop us-u.openx.net? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.
Thank you!