I usually don't have so many questions but it seems lately I do. Today, in surfing the web looking for info on PHP, a ran across a website I knew was up to something. I had a hard time getting out of it and was fighting off pop-ups (my pop-up blocker wasn't working for those). Now each time I sign off the Internet, a pop-up will appear on my computer screen. How do I get rid of it? (I have the URL of the source if that is a help)

Addendum: I apologize to all... it just noticed (finally) this forum was intended for specific computer applications and not for general questions. If I can get an answer to the above question I promise not to bother everyone with another. Please feel free to delete my subjects.

First of all, don't worry about being off-topic ~ since these forums are less than 2 weeks old I think we can be fairly lenient until we develop a place for every type of question.

Now, to answer your question, you've probably been infected with what the computer industry calls "Spyware" or "Adware". It's software that is installed on your computer 'behind the scenes' while you're either web browsing or installing an unrelated software application on your computer. To get rid of it, I suggest the following two applications:

Lavasoft's Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

Spybot Search & Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=spybotsd

I suggest downloading and installing both of these programs, as neither will remove all spyware but combined they do a pretty decent job.

If you're still having problems after running both programs, re-post here and we can go from there!

Thank you Jamie, I really appreciate your help. I've downloaded and ran both Adware and Spybot but they didn't get rid of it. However they did find a bunch of other stuff which I got rid of, alot of Alexa junk too. Adware found about 115 things and Spybot found five in HKEY.

I've been to the Symantec website but they listed too many malicious spyware and adware scripts. I looked into a few to try identifying it but there must be a better way than wade through all of them (seemingly 100's) looking for a possible match. If this will help, I got this persistent ad after visiting the PHP Resource Index website. Wanting to see its tutorial page for link management, it took me to a page with the title of 'Demon'.

More specifically, the ad appears on my computer screen ONLY AFTER I disconnect from the Internet. The guts of the URL showing is 'ADS peel' then it converts to 'belgiandip'. I have the full URL addresses but I didn't want to list them here so no one would be tempted to click on them. It is a screensaver ad. It is also identified as "/peelmedia/adserverA."

Any ideas?

Allen,

There is a thread on this particular problem located here:

http://www.mutantswarm.org/eye/viewthread.php?tid=683&page=1

But here's the meat of the resolution:



So, find that .exe and get rid of those registry references and you should be good to go.

Jamie, the problem seems to history. While I couldn't find the file name 437c.exe, although I probably didn't look in the right places (being a little intimidated by the 'run' function), I decided to try Ad-Aware once again thinking there could be updates. Sure enough there was and it found some more Spy/Adware. The problem hasn't occured since but I've read that sometimes they may lie dormant for awhile and later reappear. Hopefully not the case. Thanks for your excellent help Jamie.

That's great to hear! Have you rebooted your computer since the problem was resolved? If not, I suggest you reboot it into "Safe Mode" and then re-run the Anti-ad software, as it might find more instances that way. Let me know if you have any other problems!