Geek Help

[fictional]

Hi! As if this week wasn't fucked enough (insurance people think I don't exist! Medical assistants are rude and classist! there's FAKE GRAVITY pulling me in weird directions! I HAVE TWO PAPERS DUE and apparently I need an MRI...) - I seem to have picked up a weird Trojan! I know, I know, those filthy corners of the internet that you have to frequent in order to get the skinny on Satan...

So, I ask for assistance, Oh Ye Mighty Powers of Flist!

When I open IE, I get infinite amounts of popups; at first they were for porn; they have now devolved into ebay ads, verizon ads etc. Then the browser closes by itself for no reason. I have installed IE 7; this did nothing to help. I'm using Firefox now, which seems free of the popups, still has the occasional popup though with much less frequency, but I am concerned about infection in the innards of the machine.

Thoughts? Advice? I am poor and un-techsavvy, and would much appreciate any pearls of wisdom you lot might have to offer...

ETA: Thanks so much to anyone who offered help & advice, especially visitors from rm's flist. New Problem: The virus/trojans/malware is preventing me from running any of the setups for the spyware/virus scan etc. that I'm trying to downlad. It's just stopping in the middle. Also, it's giving me fake alerts about spyware that purport to be from Windows, but aren't. I'm beginning to think I'm truly screwed.

Comments

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Wow. Extremely helpful. I am d/ling and will attempt to put into practice this evening. Thank you again for the offer of assistance; I appreciate it greatly.

rm's flist is mighty & awesome! I shall send mental fruitbaskets to all.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

How did it go? Defense against the dark ( digital ) arts?

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I did not get my OWL.

We tried all suggestions - for a moment it looked like it worked, but we obviously didn't scotch it hard enough, as it d/led more stuff shortly after restarting.

I will have to leave it in the hands of someone trained to do such things, as I've come to bounds of what I can do on my own.

Thank you so much for your help though; it was much appreciated.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Its terribly hard to do remotely like this. In a better world I'd jsut take the L train and do it in person. Odds are you have some BHO's in place and other evil that is happening. Sadly I am trained to do this sorta thing, but I'm on the worng side of the planet.

If you are still game, grab a copy of "Hijack THis" ( http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php ) and save the report it makes and email it to me, and I can give some pointers.