Hidden program causing pop-ups

[TakedownCA]

Hi, about a month ago I started getting more pop-ups than usual. I just chalked it up to normal internet surfing annoyance. But lately I've noticed that these pop-ups appear on websites that have never had them before. They just randomly appear regardless of the site that I'm on. I recently got rid of a something called Sentry.exe that used to run on startup, but the popups haven't gone away. I've run Ad-aware a couple times and found nothing out of the ordinary. Any ideas what this prog could be and how I can get rid of it? Thanks for thelp.

 

[bsobel]

Are these popups actual windows dialog boxes vs html pages designed to look like one? If so, it's probably from Windows messenger service (not the same as MSN messenger) and implies that your directly connected to the internet with no firewall installed.

Bill

 

[ianbergman]

download "spybot search and destroy" -- free, and much better than ad-aware. it'll find your program

 

[TakedownCA]

No, it's not messenger, I know how to get rid of that. They're just html pages. I'll try spybot, though.

 

[TakedownCA]

I installed Spybot, and I think it worked. I haven't gotten any strange popups since yesterday. But it was odd seeing how much spyware Ad-aware missed.

 

[Schadenfroh]

adaware 6 with the latest updates finds more stuff than spybot. but to me spybot is a much better program. its faster and has a better user interface. plus you get to read all the smart allec remarks about the spyware that spybot finds by reading the descriptions.