Popup ads when NOT browsing

[Feisters]

I just built a new system for my girlfriend. OS is XP-Home and IE6 is the browser. Road Runner is her ISP. Last night I was visiting her, and while we were watching t.v., out of the corner of my eye, I saw a porn popup ad suddenly appear on her desktop (no browser open or known apps running). With a chuckle I asked, "What's that?" She told me that it'd been doing that ever since she got home from work that day. She suspects it's the result of some unsupervised surfing by her teenaged son.

At any rate, she'd like to stop these non-browser popups. What is causing it? Scumware/Adware? Cookies? I just need to know in what direction to begin looking?

TIA

 

[PowerMacG5]

Most probably, some adware has gotten onto her computer. Download Ad-Aware from Lavasoft. Run the program, and tell it to scan the registry, dee scan the registry, and scan the HDD's. If it detects any known adware, or spyware, it will let you know, and you have the choice to delete it.

 

[FSUpaintball]

It's happening to a friend of mine, too. He hasn't been surfing any porn (aside from Playboy), and they just keep popping up when he's trying to play CS - kicking him out of the program every 5 minutes.

We ran ad-aware, but to no avail.

Ironically, the popups say, "Want to stop popups?"

 

[jamautosound]

Originally posted by: FSUpaintball
It's happening to a friend of mine, too. He hasn't been surfing any porn (aside from Playboy), and they just keep popping up when he's trying to play CS - kicking him out of the program every 5 minutes.

We ran ad-aware, but to no avail.

Ironically, the popups say, "Want to stop popups?"

"Genius, sheer genius, lloyd!"

What a cash cow! Create a undetectable popup program that asks you if you "Want to stop pop-ups?" That's comedy.🙂

 

[jbritt1234]

Do you have KaZaA installed? It does that. I'm sot sure if any other file sharing programs do. If not, it's probably something else installed w/ spyware. Install and run Ad-Aware as suggested before.