All,
I suffered the exact same symptoms. While it took me several days of troubleshooting off and on, here is what I did to resolve the problem until someone can come up with a solution via scanning utility:
1) Added the following to my hosts file, as I saw traffic going to these sites from my computer:
ussrchsystem.com
us-srch-system.com
us-search-system.com
www.ussrchsystem.com
www.us-srch-system.com
www.us-search-system.com
ranjzork.cn
govphe2.co.cc
counter.yadro.ru
2) I then watched the processes on my computer when the system tried to go to these sites. I tried several browsers. IE, Firefox and Opera all suffered from the complication. Comodo Dragon did not suffer from the redirect issue. So, I looked deeper at the process and I honestly can't recall how I got here because I did so much poking and peeking, but, I ended up deleting this directory from my computer and the problem went away:
c:\windows\assembly\tmp\U
JUST THE 'U' directory, nothing else, it may be different on different machines as well. I noticed inside here some scripts that were extremely suspicious. One of them clearly the culprit. It had some if statements that basically said, if the url in the browser is on is one of these search engines, then inject and intercept with this designation url.
Major pain, but taken care of now.
Hope this helps.