I took my computer over to Mike and Gene's today. Mike played with it and I think we finally nailed the bug that I had.
One thing that Mike did was run a "custom" search with AdAware instead of the basic search. Using his own parameters the program was able to locate six things that it hadn't flagged before.
These, however, were not the problem.
After a bit more experimenting, Mike went and turned off any startup process that wasn't familiar. I only just realized that one of them was Winzip, but that's cool because I didn't want or need it running on startup. Anyway I also have Winrar, which I like better.
After this he checked out my Windows System folder. Every pass Spykiller would identify a program named "Cydoor" which was in "AdCache" in my Windows System folder. Spykiller said it was dangerous but could apparently not delete it. Turns out it was hidden (I didn't have show all files turned on) and was set to read-only, which I guess prevented it from being deleted by Spykiller... but once revealed it was easy to remove.
That may well have been my problem... haven't seen any signs of random popups since (in limited tests so far). Either that or one of the several unknown processes that we turned off nailed it. All hail Mike! As he says, he proved once again that he has the bigger club!
From Spykiller's web site:
It says it has cleaned the spyware, but on rescanning (without connection to the web) the parasites (your products words) are still there?
Answer:
Those remained entries are only the shorcut keys of the removed spyware or just support files for Cydoor and such html, gif, swf files that were not essential in removing the SpyWare -- just extra trash left behind. Once the main spyware files removed, they have no effect on your computer.
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