Ok. remember that problem i had with pop-ups? Well i tried a variety of popup killers/stoppers and they still appear. Second, i was told to uninstall Kazaa as this has spyware and all that crap, so i did.

But now there are still the pop-ups and also the IE browser windows dont close when i click on the X in the top right corner of the screen.

I tried to remove/reinstall Internet Explorer, but you cant in Xp.

Satis, Inquisitor, Arathorn. I need your help guys. What do i do?

yaint got some evil thing downloaded itself to you have ya? couple of weeks back I got this one thing, dunno where from, Xupiter, just suddenly appeared on my comp. installed a new IE toolbar, made itself the main search page and would bring up a pop up every minute. damned annoying. couldn't get rid of it, but luckily got my new comp 2 days after

I think thas exactly whats happened in my case.

hmm well i went looking in my 'program files' section of windows. try that and if you spot a folder that shouldn't be there delete it. may not be obvious though...

spybot S&D and/or adaware should really catch that stuff. But anyway...erm. You can look into the activex portion of IE for anything suspicious. That's in tools | internet options. Then click on settings under "temporary internet files", then "view objects". That's all the active x objects. Delete any that look wrong. I got spywared not too long ago, so mine shows nothing. Was my first clue I'd been spywared. Anyway...

y'know, if you virus and ad-scanned and are not finding anything, and IE is hosed and you can't get it to work, it might just be easier to back up your stuff, wipe your computer and just start fresh. There's not telling what all's on your system. That way you're sure.

oh, and I hate Jesus.

For a replace for Kazaa, have you got Kazeaa Lite (http://www.k-lite.tk)?

Spybot Search and destroy combined with a good virus program should rid you of any problems. Just "Add or Remove Programs" might rid you of installed plug-ins.

On a side note: I recently get messages immedeately from the internet, when internet is on I get a sort of pop-up (not the normal kind), like a grey window with text in it. Appearently my firewall (Sygate Personal Firewall) doesn't block this. Do those bastards use some sort of inside XP messaging system I can turn off? I thought there was a program like that in XP.

yes, it's called windows messenger. Not MSN, it's a different thing, used on NT OSes for system alerts and such. You can turn it off pretty easily, though.

If you have the ability to block specific ports on your router or firewall, just block UDP port 136. If you can't, then you can just turn off the windows messenger service.

Go to start | control panel | administrative tools. Open up 'services'. Find the 'messenger' service, double-click on it, and disable it. You'll probably never use it at home anyway.

To see what other XP services you can turn off, check out my services tweaks.

I thought so. I'm searching for it in my firewall now, I know it's possibel because i've recently allowed some ports for eMule to work properly.
Done it, are there any other things you know off that use that port?

Yeah, all porn and games use that port as well, so might just as well throw out ur pc now it's lost all its uses. Ahem, ignore me.

heh. port 136 is one of the NetBIOS ports, I believe. May be used by file/printer sharing, though I think that's primarily UDP 139. Not really sure. Still, it shouldn't matter too much. You probably don't wanna be sharing stuff out to the internet in general anyway, eh?

I only share p2p and that seems to work.

Thanks for the help Satis.

np