for the computer wizzes

Guy,
do a google search for software to stop popups, i use a program called 3B Web Watch after the first time you can stop them from a popup window, once they get you its hard to stop them.Regards Bob
Where to next

get your self ad-aware 6.0 clean all the spy ware off your computer this program will also stop those pop ups.keep the computer clean of all the nasty crap you can get from surfin around,just wish i could do the same for all the red dust when travellin around hope i could help.

Agree with both of the above. Also you can think about using a different browser, my guess is you are using MS internet exlorer ( just ask telstra bigpond at the moment what they think of MS software)
Try http://www.mozilla.org/ which is a free download for OSX, Linux or even Windows as a last resort :-) It has settings to block pop-up windows etc.
(As an aside I've just downloaded their thunderbird mail software which seems good - and again gets you away from the evil empire and its security risk).
If you want to keep using internet explorer you can try increasing the security/privacy settings - this is a 2 edged sword however.

Regards,
Brad

Guy,
have a look/chat with these people. They are very helpful.
http://forums.spywareinfo.com
Glenos

How the hell does one get this popup up stuff in the first place. There are programs to stop it but are there programs to get it. Sounds like a good idea to me.My Best Mates
Hooroo
Ray

i spent ages trying to clean the exact same thing off a mates win98 laptop...
i believe it goes back to a webdialler that was installed (most likely by exploiting one of 100 known bugs in ie5.x)
i ran ad aware and cleaned everything
i purged the exe's it was launching off the guys hard disk
i manually hacked thru the registry for anything running on startup
i removed all trace of this thing.... 10 minutes later... it's back!!
my advice... backup what you need, format and rebuild with 2k (plus all patches) or xp (plus all patches).

cheers,

KG.

Guy,

I get this type of call often from customers. Firstly, you will find that one one of these sites you have visited you were asked or not asked to trust a certain program. You may have elected to trust the program. If this is the case you will find that programs were installed on your computer, these will throw up browser windows at various times of the day pointing at all sorts of crap sites. If this is the case and I suspect it is then getting popup killers will not fix the problem. (Most of the popup killers are designed to kill pop up windows during your browsing session, they will not all kill windows launched via installed programs). In fact popup killers can also be as much of a pain as spam killers (they just do not always work and sometimes kill real information).

Ok If this is the problem have a look in Control Panel - select add remove programs. See if there is a strange program names in there. If you are unsure what should or should not be there then just post the names of the programs that you are unsure about - I will tell you which ones. Remove the sus program, this is the first check.

Second is to check the C:\Program Files folder and see if there are any strange program files in the base folder, again let me know the names of any files in this directory (not the folders just the files).

Then we need to check the registry however, I need to know your version of windows to tell you where to look - Some of the smarter (dumb) programs remove the un-install/control panel stuff and hide themselves on the registry. This is why we need to look into the registry to find if a weird program is running or loaded.

Regards
ExplorOz Team - David
--------------------------
Always working, not enough travelling ;-)

I agree with an earlier suggestion. Download a copy of ad-aware and run it, it will locate all of the software on your pc which is causing the pop-ups and allow you to delete it. You could do everything manually as has also been suggested, but why bother. Ad aware will take care of this for you.

Also look at your hosts file. This is a file that IP looks at forst to resolve names in the internet, it is often used in intranets.

Several pop up programs hijack this and there is one in particular that redirects you when you think you are on google, MSN etc.

First open windows explorer and go to tools, folder options. click on display hidden files. Selectg show hidden files and apply to all directories.

Depending on the version of windows it is usually somewhere like
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc.

Right click on hosts and open with notepad. If you see tons of entries with search engines, some pop up program has hijacked your hosts file.

If your PC is a personal one ( ie not part of an intranet at work.) the easiest thing to do is delete this file. ( it will come back automatically)

If your computer is part on an intranet at work, get IS to give you a new hosts file.
Ignore the LMhosts file.

This is pertty common and the purpose of it is to redirect your browser to some IP address regardelss of where you think you are going.

Then one good free program to scrub and keep your pc clean is 'Spybot search and destroy'.

Search for it on google etc.

Regards

Boobook

thanks all giving them all ago
Guy