Quick computer question

Hey, whaddya know! My latest popup wants me to download Avast antivirus. How much of a coincidence is that?

Dan - as far as I know I haven't used any of these sites. My historial is very simple. It consists of:

Yahoo
Runnersworld
Easyjet
A variety of dictionaries
Er.... that's it.

I don't buy anything off t'internet except flights.

I'm going to download what FB said.

A great deal of popups are part of the fuctionality installed when using free programs or browser toolbars on the WIndows platform.
The biggest issue with WIndows is it runs all applications with administrive privileges as such they can do what they want to the system
Windows also does not display everything which is running on your system at start up which is where most of these applications which present popups hide and load.

The first thing you need to do is detemine what your computer is loading at startup. To do this download an application called hijack this from Trend Micro
http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/

HijackThis examines certain key areas of the Registry and Hard Drive and lists their contents. These are areas which are used by both legitimate programmers and hijackers. Some items are perfectly fine. You should not remove them. Never remove everything. Doing that could leave you with missing items needed to run legitimate programs and add-ins.

The following URL provides information on using Hijack this
http://www.whatthetech.com/hijackthis/

The following forums are a great resolurce for the removal of malware which it sounds like you may have
http://forums.whatthetech.com/Are_you_Infected_t106388.html

Alternativly if you want me to review your hijack this log simply post it to the forum and I would be happy to have a look.

I do not believe at this time, it is website prompted but an application or browser plugin which adds that functionality to your system. Usually these are rouge processes whch start up during the windows boot process and I do not believe that changing the browser will resolve the issue.
You will have to go through the processes of removing the offending malware imho.

Before doing this we need to establish what is running on your system and what needs to run on it.

I can review the list for you or alternatively you can use a website to process the log against a database of suspect malware

http://www.hijackthis.de/

http://hjt.networktechs.com/

If there is any process which you are uncertain about I would advise not to remove it without further investigation, google can be useful for this. 

If you want me to review the log or any section you are concerned about I would be happy to do so