On the advice of some trusty FReepers, I installed Mozilla's FIREFOX browser, and made it my default. This also required a trip to my touchpad's manufacturer's website to download their latest drivers, so the Synaptec touchpad will work properly with Firefox. All in all, about two hour's work with a dialup connection.
What a doll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Surfing is now noticeably faster, as are downloads and graphics. There has been no trace of a popup OR a hijack for over a week now. And tabbed browsing is, in fact, a joy. Daily runs of ad-aware and Spybot have turned up NO SPYWARE, ADWARE, OR MALWARE at all for the past seven days, and that includes one evening when I actually TRIED (don't ask how) to get some! Going online has indeed become pleasant again.
However, a few iggies...
Internet Explorer still has access to the 'net after you download Firefox. A brief search found some stuff it had gotten on its lonesome, apparently. No sweat...I merely instructed my Zone Alarm to block all Internet access to that program. No more problems.
Moral? Even if you use Mozilla's excellent products, keep your firewalls and "guard" programs. Mozilla might be immune, but IE still provides backdoors to the bad guys. I did note that IE's homepage was changed by a BHO today (Browser Hijack Blaster kindly informed me whilst it tore the offender out by the roots), but had I not been notified, it's doubtful I'd have noticed. Thus, other things might have happened. If ZA doesn't seal it off, I'll simply delete IE.
Thanks again for all the advice and patience to us novices and nuggets here! I truly hope that as many have been helped as I was, and without the headaches.
I find it interesting that IE still managed to pick up stuff when you weren't actually using it. THat would point to one of two things, either you have been hijacked and none of your scanners have spotted it, or some other program on your computer is using IE to do something. The most likely culpret in the latter case is if you are using Outlook for your email.
Outlook makes etensive use of IE, and I'm not sure that there is any way to stop it.
Very, very cool. Sounds like you've got a good handle on things. Do check out The Proxomitron though. I think I posted that advice on this thread. With that proxy running on port 8080 and setting IE and Firefox to use port 8080 you'll be looked down tighter than a medieval virgin in a chastity. belt.