Control, Alt, Delete

No shortcut of which I'm aware is gonna work, Frank, sorry. The symptoms you describe indicate multiple instances of yuckware reside on your machine. A number of the nasties hide and/or otherwise protect themselves from most typical and even many relatively sophisticated discovery and removal techniques, which is what makes them so insidious, prerplexing, and persistent. All have to be defeated and removed in order to solve your problem. Miss any, and they just hold the door open and holler for their freinds to come back in. It is not unlikely the proceedure to which I referred you will get rid of most, but not all, of the critters bugging you, but following it as detailed, and reporting as requested, will greatly aid the effort of returning control of your system to you. Yuckware is a lot trickier to get rid of than to get; thats why what amounts to a yuckware-removal industry, complete with all sorts of folks who want your money in exchange for their solutions has sprung up. Many of the for-fee solutions in fact do more harm than good. The only cost involved with what I suggest for you is time and attention to detail. If you'd like, skim through the Computers forum here, and look over the topic titles prefixed by the word "[Resolved]" ...that oughtta tell you something.


Edit to Add - On second thought, there is one shortcut that offers a relatively high potential for success; you could always format your hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch, then rebuild your system following proper privacy and security protocols

Timber....

...first of all...an acknowledgement....

...you know more about this stuff than I would know if I studied very hard for the rest of my life.

I just gotta tell you, though, that although I am sure this pop up nonsense will start up again as soon as I shut down and reboot...

...for the moment...the pop ups are back to ABSOLUTE ZERO.

Lemme reiterate:

The pop ups were coming dozens each session on...in fact, tens of dozens. Every time I tried to type a memo, email, or response to an A2K thread...is had to stop several times to allow the pop ups to appear...and then to delete them.

DOZENS...each session.

Since I deleted that item the day before yesterday...NOT ONE...not one single pop up.

I know the box that comes up when you hit control; alt; delete...contains all the programs that are running whenever the computer is booted.

I have so many different items in that box...much, much more than I remember earlier on.

Something about deleting that "Advertisments"...did the job...even if only on a temporary basis.

Not sure why...or how...but, Timber...

...I tell you...they are gone, gone, gone.

I still will try to find time and patience to do the stuff mentioned in that tutorial at some point soon...but for now...this is heaven .

You have pop-ups at a2k? I've never had them!
What browser are you using?

I've had pop ups all over the place. I do not think A2K was a source at all...but I was having dozens upon dozens of them up until two days ago.

Oh, I see, but Frank, don't you have a feature in your browser that prevents pop-up windows? (by the way, Firefox also has an adblock feature for all the advertisement within a site)

Yes...and it has been on.

But whatever infected my computer...simply managed to cause pop ups to appear.

Lemme give you the full history.

I had pop ups back a ways....and Craven advised me to do the SpyBot thingy...and that cleared everything up for a long while. I also enabled the pop up blocker that AOL provides.

In any case...no pop-up for a very, very long time.

Then...about 3 - 4 weeks ago...I got a few pop-ups. Nothing really bad a first...but each day there were more and more of them...and pretty soon they started interfering with everything I was doing on line.

Now...after accidentally coming in contact with the "advertising" thing I mentioned above...and eliminating it...

...no pop ups. Not a one.

So...I still have got to do a clean up as Timber advised....but I did want to let Timber know how things have gone so far.

Ah, the pain of PC users.

Luckily you're pop up free (for now )

Glad things are better, Frank ... hope they stay that way a while. Just FYI over the past month or 6 weeks or so, a few nasties targeted to AOL-specific software have been "popping up" witrh increasing regularity - it seems the primary - not exclusive, but primary - victims are AOL users. The infection techniques are all but invisible to most security/privacy software - even (not surprisingly) AOL's own security/privacy add-ons and plugins. Properly updated and configured, Windows/Internet Explorer should be presented no real problem by the stuff, but the kicker is the "Properly updated and configured" bit. And once a system is infected, these critters are a bear to get rid of.

Thats a given, subtleone - its in The Process