Dear Molly... I mean LJ Genie...

[snugglekitty]

Okay. Moving on.

I have now run the free TrendMicro scan program on my desktop. I have also run SpyBot Search and Destroy.

TrendMicro found four infected files, which it deleted. Search and Destry found nothing.

I am still getting unexpected restarts and strange popups.

What should I try next?

Comments

Re: stabs in the dark

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

This sounds like there is an actual program running locally that is spawning copies of IE to show the ad. This really smells of Gator or some other ad generator. I'm wondering if there was some freeware loaded. A lot of the time Freeware also installs Gator or eqiv to generate revenue instead of charging for the sw. Some of the larger companies like Gator have paid off the adware/malware detector people to leave them off of the lists. I know that you have WeatherBug loaded it may be the one spawning the copies of IE.

Re: stabs in the dark

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

How would I test the theory?

Re: stabs in the dark

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

Start deleting everything that you don't need. You can see all of the programs that are registered in the control panel-add/remove programs area. These are only the valid ones but it's possible that the adblaster is bundled with a legitement program and it will go away when the main program is gone; Gator works like that since they have to play nice or people will start calling them bad names again. There are programs that can be run to list all of the autorun entries in the registry to see if there is something that shouldn't be there.

hmm

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

I didn't see anything that looked wrong, but I don't know what everything on the list is. (I wouldn't necessarily, even if it was all valid.) Maybe you can take a look later?

Or, if you can point me at one of the programs you mentioned, I could take a gander at that.