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.

oh yes believe me he does need it this type of very serious rogue does not just disappear!! Please tell him not to use any passwords with it this way and definitely not to do any type of banking or financial transactions. the fact it is not allowing him to install security programs is HELLO A HUGE RED FLAG telling him all is NOT well. I can not stress how important it is to have this pc cleaned. The forum at LzD is excellent they lead you step by step through the cleaning process running the proper scans. There is nothing that you can just run and make it go away this is a multi step process. This is the direct link to the malware removal area of LzD, register there, start a post of your own there giving all this info and the team will help. They are very patient and willing to answer all questions. If you need help along the way just let me know I am there also. Analysis and Malware Removal It is likely if he took it in to someplace to have this cleaned they would instead wipe his drive and reformat the pc and he would lose everything not backed up. So he should at the very least back up what ever he treasures that is on that pc.

Deb, Did you get this straightened out? I ended up with the SAME problem last night. I am so ready to scream! I went to bed at 1:30 after nearly falling asleep waiting on a scan and got back up to start all over again! I ran the two things mentioned just as they said to with no luck. Well, I can't say that. The Roguefix did find some issues that it said it fixed but I still get the IE pop-up that takes you to iedefender's site (if I try to search for things, I end up at porn site and there always a search thing that says it's YouTube Porn with a picture of the video right next to it! It's been fun trying to fix this and not let my kids see it or when I end up at one of their sites accidently!). I have the latest Free version of AVG. Everything is up to date. I run it and get nothing. I ran a Symantec free scan but of course only get told I have one problem...can't find out what that problem is unless I pay! Not like it USED to be! Panda did show 2 hacker and one other issue, however, it ran for over an hour and was only about 1/4 of the way through scanning! Nothing else takes THAT long! I have cleaned my temp files and cookies, through Disk Clean-up and CCleaner and have done so manually through Internet Options just to be sure. I ran Ad-Aware and it located a few things...onestep search is the one thing I noticed was different but it said it deleted that. Then I ran Spy-bot and it found the ie defender and said it removed that. I run those every couple of days on a regular basis. They are always updated.... I found things that said about the System Restore files, so I went about shutting that off and starting over to remove anything that could have been there. Something else told me to go through and show hidden files and what not...did that along with searhing through other things that they claimed would help me locate the problem...NOTHING to be found. I have run several things through Safe Mode to be sure...nothing changes. I'm at my wits end, that's for sure. I have spent all day so far at the computer or waiting on some scan to finish up with no results. It used to be that you could do a search and find info on how to remove something and now all you end up in is forums filled with hijack this and millions of other logs and you have to wait for someone to go over everything and tell you what to do. I just want to FIX it without having to download 20 programs, run 15 scans....Can you tell I'm not used to us getting viruses? LOL We don't and usually the "problem" can be fixed by cleaning Temp files so this is driving me crazy!

Went through settings again. I hate to do this as it boxes me in on some needed access. Those background pop ups are extremely annoying. Not only am I irritated with GW having one more thing to annoy us, how the heck do they think I want to gamble? They can barrage me with this stuff all day and I'll never go there. This is becoming such an issue with GW that their site could begin to lose members. When are they going to realize such?