@ sleeve: I don't think it's a wizard as you normally see, it's more of a console that has all the information and troubleshooting stuff in one place.

@ tw: I will do all that tonight. I can tell the original equip (and perhaps associated software?) was outdated; this new interface is so much easier. Thanks for your help. Now get off my lawn.

My internet is running faster too, with none of the apprehension when Toontown freezes up and I wonder if I'm getting booted. :)

Has anyone hear heard of "Personal Antivirus"? Apparently, it's a program that attaches to a computer and tries to get you, the consumer, to purchase their product. It's constantly "popping up" saying your computer is infected with miscellaneous viruses, etc.

We have Norton/Symantec - I ran that program and it didn't detect anything - maybe that's not good, cause it didn't say anything about this Personal Antivirus.

If anyone here does know anything about it - how can I get rid of it? I found instructions online from bleepingcomputer.com, but I don't know if that is "reputable" and don't want tol make it worse.

Try spyware Doctor - I had a similar issue/program/virus/whatever... It got rid of it for me. But I would wait till one of the more knowledgeable dwellars gives you some advice.

I cleaned that piece of crap off of somebody's computer just last week.

bleepingcomputer.com usually has pretty good advice. They have some FAQs on common spyware issues, "help my computer's running too slow" etc.

They gave detailed instructions on "how to". I have to download a Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Download Link. I just wasn't sure about that.

Also, when I was at that site - bleepingcomputer - it would almost instantly come up a "black type" screen with some type of message saying this site is blocked, so I don't even know if I will be able to download that link.

A few summers ago, I monitored the internet for all incoming packets. Repeatedly found packets that say something like "Your computer has been found infected. Download this antivirus software..." These packets would arrive about every 40 minutes with a reply address that was traced to Northeast China.

Amazing how many times this spam routinely arrived to so many computers. Of course, even the Windows 98 machine ignored it because no 'Window' was waiting for a message addressing that port. IOW you may not know how many internet packets with such popups and other malware are routinely rejected by your machine even without Anti-virus protection.

Jester,

You really want to go to www.malwarebytes.org and get yourself a copy of their anti-malware software. It is that good!

You also should visit www.ubcd4win.com and make one of those CDs, as they are at version 3.50. It works really well.

Mitch

Malwarebytes took a couple hours to do a complete scan and found a couple things hiding in restore. I guess AVG couldn't find them, although it does a complete scan (about 3.5 hrs) daily.

I've been trying to fix this, but it's not working very well for me. The computer that's messed up won't even let me download the software. Everytime I go to the website and "click" on the link, my internet closes. While I can go back to that website the same thing happens. I went to another computer to download the file onto a disc, but once downloaded onto said computer it doesn't do anything.

Concerning the other website, ubcd4win. Not sure if I understood it enough, but it was talking about "rebooting", will that delete everything on the computer and then I will have to reload?

Jester,

Find another PC to download the items onto and transfer them onto a USB stick to install on the affected PC.

If you use ubcd4win, it doesn't delete everything. It just lets you reboot the PC into a different version of Windows that you can use to clean out malware and viruses. It works really well, actually.