Popups from my own system

[Geof]

I'm having trouble locating a program that is causing my
system to become a popup advertiser. Anytime I open up
IE, and visit a page that I know for a fact has NO popups,
popup(s) will open. I've also noticed that every so
often, whatever this program is will create a file
called "time.html" in my root directory, that connects to
a 3rd party site to get ad information.

I figured this might be an ActiveX control, but I don't
know the file extension of ActiveX files. I've run cache
cleaners, virus scanners, nothing is helping. I want to
find this program, and erase it. Web based popups are bad
enough, but when my own system is doing it to me as well,
that's just too much.

I've also set all of IE's security settings to their
maximum values, which didn't help, which also leads me to
the conclusion that my system is running this garbage. If
it matters, I'm running IE v. 6.0 (no updates have been
installed yet)

TIA

 

[DVarnau]

Try:
Ad-aware 6- Lavasoft: http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
and
Spybot - Search & Destroy : http://security.kolla.de/

Less likely that it's a BHO, but: BHOCaptor:
http://www.webattack.com/get/bho.shtml

Go to http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/restricted.htm#Setting for security
recommendations.

Regards,
Don