My dads computer has the following text on a pop-up that comes up every 15 or so seconds as is driving him nuts. First time it came up the did click on the link button but nothing seemed to happen. Previous to this he was getting a large black box on his desk top too, but this seems to have gone since I got him to run Spybot and Adaware. He's run both of these a few times but it has not got rid of the pop-up:

Here's the text:

Yellow triangle with exclamation mark inside top left hand corner. X in top right hand corner.
Headed Your computor is infected
Windows has detected spyware infection
It is recommended to use special antispyware tools
to prevent data loss.
Windows will now download and install the most up-to-date antispyware for you Click here to protect your computor from spyware!

He has AVG installed but this does seem to have stopped it.

So what the best thing to do? And any ideas what it is?

Cheers techy geeks

You could give Stinger a try. Also if your running XP try a system restore to a few days back. Try the Microsoft Antispyware tool aswell

My techy son will be home from work at about 7 tonight, if no one else susses it for you I will get him to read your note.and see if he can help.Try searhing for the file in "search for files and folders" and see if it a little program running in the background, if it is you may be able to uninstall in the "remove programs"section or delete it.
Steve.

Cheers so far - remember to keep the advise to non-techy language for the old chap, or I'll have to translate!

BTW - I've sent him a link to this thread so he can read the replies and have a go at fixing it, so keep them decent

Have you tried right clicking on it to find it's properties? Find out where it's coming from and you stand more chance of getting rid of it.

Infections of this type tend to create files under various names scattered all over the windows system they also any one of them can re-spread the infection through the system.
Try a system restore then re-run your virus/hijack software before rebooting.

If that dosen't work


Usual course is down load ad-aware and hijackthis, frea-AV then reboot in safe mode disable system restore, then halt any running processes, before trying to clear out the infection --- takes a while often you need several reboots.
If that dosen't work and you run Xp Ewido is very effective product with this kind of threat http://www.ewido.net/en/

If hes only got the shareware version of AVG it isnt the most upto date youd be amazed at what I found when i upgraded to the full version, also does he have a firewall (not the standard xp version) loaded? sounds like it may be spyware, try downloading the trial version of spysweeper from webroot http://www.webroot.com/?rc=266&ac=629&wt.srch=1&wt.mc_id=629


[Edited on 27/12/05 by Taz Surfleet]

Xp firewall is actually OK provided SP2 is installed -- all that was really missing from the original version was an easy way of changing the settings.

go to www.download.com

search for

spybot search and destroy

download it
install it
run it

....!

Thanks for the input - he did a few of the things suggested and fixed the problem