Do I have a virus? Here's my symptom...

Here's what happened. I was surfing the web when pages and pages of IE just kept popping up. I tried to "beat" them from opening by clicking on the X in the corner, and also right clicking on the lower tabs. Even if I got them all closed, it would still open more. I was at another forum type site, and have never experienced this before. I don't go to any sites that I'd suspect as "bad," but what do I know? The only way to stop it was to ctrl-alt-del and restart from there. Going from the start menu would popup the 3 button standby-shutdown-restart option, but a new IE page would popup and block me. I have McAfee and it's not saying anything. Does this just happen sometimes?

 

Are the popups advertisements or fake system messages?

1. Download Ad-Aware and Windows Defender

2. Boot in safe mode

3. Run the programs and see what they find.

 

They were copies of the page I was on. If they were popups or advertisements...I'd be more nervous. They pages that I wanted to be at...just 20+ copies of them.

 

What site was this? It's very easy to run a script that pops up replicas of the page you are on, it's uncommon because it's annoying and doesn't really serve in the best interests of the website as they don't get advertising/linking income this way.

If you have IE's popup blocker enabled, or installed your custom popup blocker, do you mind trying this without them on? Just a hunch. Oh, and be ready to pull your ethernet cable if you encounter another avalanche.

 

Well I'm on wireless...so I can turn my wireless off. The side I'm at is www.mtbr.com. It's another forum site, like this one, except for mountain bikes. I've been going there for years, and many of my buds so there too. Seems to be out of the ordinary. I get popup blocking from I think IE. I don't have a custom installed program. Maybe Mcafee does it too. Can't rememeber specifically. I do have to hold ctrl down from time to time to get a page I want through.