Twice in two day’s I’ve been on Ebay and when I’ve done a search for whistles, or whatever, a pop up ad has come up AND installed a program called weather watch or scan or something to my computer. Nothing I want. Nothing I downloaded it just pops up on it’s own and installs itself. I’ve gone and removed it twice now. I’m trying to find out where on the Ebay site you log in complaints but I’m not finding anything.
Has this happened to anyone else?
Mary,
the really really foaming at the mouth p#$$ed off mouse!
I haven’t seen it, but download adaware or some other similar program to remove all that garbage from your computer. I think you can set your browser to not accept that junk in the security settings as well
Yeah, in IE, go to tools → internet options → security tab. Select internet, then click custom level. I have stuff set as follows:
Download Signed ActiveX controls: Prompt Download unsigned ActiveX controls: disable Initialize… ActiveX controls: Disable
Run ActiveX controls: Enable
If you set that last one to ‘prompt’, you should get a prompt before that junk loads, and you’ll be able to disable the problematic plugins. I tried browsing around ebay to find exactly what the prblem was, but I didnt hit it, so I can’t really give you much better details than that though.
Here, DMouse- http://www.komando.com/bestshareware.asp You can download Adaware from this site plus some other cool stuff to help. It will scour your drive for those ad-spy thingies that might be lurking there. Good luck!
All of the above is good info, spyware is lurking in every corner of the interenet, and a real pain. There are some good security packages avaliable from Norton and such forth.
Download or even call Microsoft for a copy of IE6 with SP1, If you live around Europe I could get one sent to you as I work for MS Europe.
I recently had some weather program auto download onto my PC as well.
Here is what REALLY burned me up. When I tried to uninstall it a web page opened that asked my why I wanted to uninstall it!!!
I was furious. I entered some scathing stuff in the comments. I doubt they will care.
Earlier today I read this thread and left it thinkng how lucky I have been to not have had any obvious glaring problems with things automatically installing themselves on my computer. Then I went to search for some information on guitars… oh man! I ended up with some awful thing that not only reset my homepage all by itself, but it installed some terrible thing in my browser and added a ton of stupid folders full of their links to my bookmarked favorites listing! Sheesh! Stuff like that should be illegal!!! So I downloaded the adware thing and set to cleaning house. If that wasen’t SHOCKING!!! A ton of stuff… and happily it is all gone, for now. Thanks for the heads up on this problem and for pointing out ways to fight this ugly garbage!
If I could get my hands on the people who create those pop up ads I’d print them all and make the idiots eat the dang things. Page by page by page. Actually I wouldn’t, it would kill too many trees, but thinking about doing that makes everytime I delete one.
The company I work for (fighting the system from within) are partly responsible for internet ads and pop ups. We had a 1/2 hour presentation yesterday from one of the perps. I told him what a pain-in-the-@r$€ I thought pop ups were, and he said they promote brand awareness, and while we (the company) NEVER recommend their use, they (the advertisers) love them because they are extremely cheap to do.
I find most forms of advertising intrusive, be it junk mail, junk e-mail, TV ads or trailers for films on a video I have bought.
The second time it happened I filled out their form. And I let a few obscenitites fly. They had it coming. Who invited them to my computer? Certainly not me!
Another free option is to use the browser, “Opera”. Among other cool features, it has an internal pop-up ad killer. I haven’t seen a pop up add since I switched to it.
I’m giveing a popup killer program a try. It’s called StopZilla. It’s free for 15 days. So far so good. It shows a list of pop ups it’s banned and it shows I was hit by that weathercast wh@re again!
Holy cow… chicken, pig, sheep…!!! 
So I downloaded the adware thing and set to cleaning house. If that wasen’t SHOCKING!!! A ton of stuff… and happily it is all gone, for now. Thanks for the heads up on this problem and for pointing out ways to fight this ugly garbage!
