OT: getting rid of spyware

Win ME does not get affected by the messenger ads because it does not have that service running at all.

Yours sound like web based popup ads - most likely coming from one of the browser pages that you have running, or a spyware component. Since you ran ad-aware, which is usually pretty accurate, my guess is that its from one of the web pages. A quick way to tell is to close all browser windows including those that have an icon in the task bar but may not show an actual window on the screen. If you still have a popup come up, well, then its spyware - then you would have to try tracking it down by looking in the registry to see what is loaded on startup.
 
You might also check in the Documents and Settings\YourUser\Start Menu\Programs. When I had 98, there were some malicious web sites that loaded executables into this folder somehow.

And you'll be glad you got rid of ME. I can think of no code more universally hated.
 
AdAware is great, but it works after the fact.

adshield.org

lets you select the ads to block as you encounter them

and search for spywareblaster. Stops them in the first place
 
Quote from j_medved:

A quick way to tell is to close all browser windows including those that have an icon in the task bar but may not show an actual window on the screen.
More...

Seems like I only get the popups when IE is left open -- doesn't seem to matter which site I'm looking at, eventually I'll get a popup about once every 20 minutes from 2 specific sites which I've never heard of til now.

Is there something I can tweak on my IE settings to stop these? I tried using security restrictions but they still appear.
 
You can turn off JavaScript, but doing so will break too many web sites for it to be practical. Get one of the free popup blockers. Oh, there is one I forgot to mention that is free:
Naviscope - http://www.naviscope.com/

Its pretty simple and has some nice features for browsing message boards, like prefetching NEXT pages
 
Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

Is there any way to prevent popups from certain sites from loading at all? Pop-up killer is ok but I still get interference from the ads loading.
 
the ad should not load at all with a properly blocked popup. If you block the URL, you are not blocking the popup. You are blocking the page that shows up on the popup, which is why you are still seeing something come up. A good popup killer will make it so you will not see any popup at all
 
The naviscope seems to work pretty well -- looks like I'm getting about 11 popups every 10 minutes now (this is with 4 or 5 IE's open) but the windows don't load up at all now.

Thanks for the help.
 
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