Please warn people that reformatting should be last resort as it's not as simple as saving pictures and files. It's basically restoring and building up your entire computer software collection, from partitioning (since you're reformatting you may want to), to reinstalling all programs again, or performing large updates (if you have XP SP2 CD for example and need to download XP SP3). It takes a lot more time than doing some simple things that may fix his problem. And unless you've had your computer for around 10 years, you should not have reformatted it at least 20 times, or you're doing something wrong.


indolegend, what were/are you doing when the pop up appears? Usually something will trigger it and not just pop up randomly.

Since you've tried some methods already, another thing you can try is to download hijackthis, run it, and then post the results in the box at http://www.hijackthis.de/. It should give you a decent analysis of what's running on your computer and if you're running any programs that may be harmful to your computer.

 

theres a boot option called safemode + networking

it turns on all the network related services in windows. lots of trojans/malware are tied to these and cannot be found/removed without the net services running

 

paying for AV is dumb.

AVG Free is just as good, if not better, than kaspersky.

 

I've found that the latest versions of AVG have been bloated and hog a lot more system resources than past versions .

-Brian

 

Agreed, I removed it from my PC as it was running SUPER slow.

 

or you could just turn off all the bull****

 

Stop It.

That 'scorch the earth' type of advice will do the user more harm than good. It doesn't account for things like software licenses (good luck if theres anything by Autodesk that needs to get re-provisioned), email archives (certain POP & Cached Exchange accounts pull the data down to a local file which if lost is unrecoverable), internet bookmarks, security certificates/tokens, and stored passwords.

Not only that, but just copying them to another source without cleaning first is an easy path to re-infection.

If the infection is so bad that the drive needs to be wiped out, its safer for both sides to pop in a clean drive, rebuild from there, and keep the old drive for de-herping then file transfer.