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Annoying pop-up ads

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by lovesmarties

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I receive pop-up ads since 1-9-04 even with having Google pop-up ads blocker. I also downloaded Lovasoft Ad-aware 6 and Spyware blaster to prevent and remove infected files on my PC. None of them worked and everyday I have to run Ad-aware program to remove the infected files, otherwise I will be bombarded by pop-up ads after opening IE browser.
How can I solve my problem?

17 replies

by lovesmarties

Your answer is good but not complete. I wish someone finds the cause of it for me. Everything was perfect before. We have a firewall in our company and I don't think Windows XP firewall would help because once I enabled it and I was not able to see our network neighborhood machines. About the zonealarm, I need to investigate it more. Thanks for your respond.

by thechas

On an XP system, many pop-ups come in through Windows Messaging and not IE.

Unless you need Windows Messenger for work, make sure it is fully disabled.

Among other places, instructions for disabling messenger are posted at www.onecomputerguy.com

As far as a local firewall, it is a good security measure. The one built in to XP is NOT a very good firewall.
With any software firewall, you need to configure the firewall to allow you to see and be seen by your network.

My favorite method for blocking pop-up adds is to use the Mozilla browser. www.mozilla.org

The built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla is more effective than most of the 3rd party pop-up blocker utilities.

Another thought, if Cool Web Search is one of the pop-up sources, it has become very good at blocking most attempts to remove it.

Check out the information and links at this site:
http://www.merijn.org/

The site was down when I just checked on it. They did have a link to a utility that was able to remove Cool Web Search.

Chas

by donmars

Do a search for an IE add-on called "Crazy Browser" it is free and works in IE. It has some neat other features also. A firewall will not block popups since they are comming in on the same hole you go out to the net on. I have had good success with Crazy Browser.

by otl

I suggest annotating the domain for the offending (WWW.) site, then add it as blocked (in IE) tools -> internet options -> privacy -> edit. Make sure under privacy -> advanced that third-party cookies are either blocked or you are prompted to accept cookies. Find the offending cookies on your computer and delete them. This effective kills Pop-ups from these sites, some on my list are;

ad-flow.com
adserver.com
adserver.net
advertising.com
advertising.net
akamai.com

by dragonwagon

Try checking out your hosts file. Maybe it was hacked by some adware. Close all open browser windows. Search your drive for hosts.* , open up any files found (probably in Windows dir) with notepad and see if any of the entries jive with any popups you are getting. Remove those line entries. Save file and reopen Internet explorer to test.

I assume that you are up to date on the latest windows updates. If not, you should be.

Windows update, Zonealarm, Spybot, and an up-to-date antivirus program are your friends!

by scherko

Goto RUN and type "MSCONFIG" goto the last tap that says "START UP" in there will be many CHECKED programs. See if any are wierd or unfamiliar to you. If you are sure what the are, uncheck them. Some stuff such as KAZAA inbed encrytion in IE. Another idea is goto WINDOWS UPDATE" if you have DSL or CABLE and get the entire security collection from them and this may fix the problem. Good Luck!

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