The extremely obtrusive pop-ads arrived after iVillage bought gardenweb. My impression is that the ads drove aways a huge percentage of visitors, leaving some forums almost moribund compared to pre-ads levels of traffic. I'd prefer an annual subscription to buy access to gardenweb rather than fighting ads for crap I'll never buy. From a suggestion here, I added NoScript to Firefox and made gardenweb tolerable again, but the forums are still much less useful than pre-iVillage.

Good suggestions on the updates as well as the anti virus. I'd also recommend doing a registry scan/clean. That is how alot of the little bot programs hide themselves..can scan for free too like the antivirus Andie Here is a link that might be useful: registryeasy.com

tomh_ga, Something to keep in mind when dealing with infected systems and using System Restore. System Restore will not infect a system unless a 'restore point' is activated. When trying to clean an infected computer wait till the system is clean of whatever it is you're trying to get rid of before purging system restore points. In the case that you should do damage to your system - 'an infected system restore point is better than none at all'. http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=15265&sid=f99fc4aceedff192a5242516fe78cd83 http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2005/09/17/66724.aspx Witz

I use the Sea Monkey browser and it has a small plug in called Adblock . It blocks most pop ups by blocking the content from displaying. You might want to try it. You can find Sea Monkey at the link below and then get the plug in by clicking on Add Ons on the left hand side of the scrren. Here is a link that might be useful: Sea Monkey Broswer