WIerd Ad Prompt

For some reason when I am just on the internet a wird promp comes up. (attatched)
HOw did it get there and how do I get rid of it? It doesn't happend on just one site, or any. It is on my comp. and comes on all of the time. The prompts say diff. things too. Any help would be great!

sorry, here:

It's most likely some stupid ad on a website that they specifically designed to look like a Windows error message. Like other ads, you can use a pop-up blocker, but spammers are always trying to find a way to outsmart them so you are never 100% ad free

But it comes up all the time. And the only site I go to is mine.......it is on my comp. somewhere, how do I get rid of it?

google for ad-aware or some other spy-ware scanning software.
See if it will find any software that might be running that you are not aware of.

I have spybot search and destroy v1.2
it isn't finding anything.

That's the winpopup service, I receive those every once in a while. You can either block the port (google is your friend ) or simply delete or rename winpopup.exe.

It's called winpopup.exe if you are using Windows 95/98/ME, but in Windows NT/2000/XP it is the Windows Messaging Service, which you can turn off under "Services" in the "Administrative Tools" section of your Control Panel.

This is simply the most irritating internet marketing attempt yet, and it has left quite a few people totally unprepared for this new intrusive method. Simply put, the spammers cast about for randon IP addresses, searching for any that might have Windows Messaging turned on, and unprotected by a firewall.

Such irony: almost no one uses Windows Messaging for any "real" purposes. It is probably one of the most useless things Microsoft ever designed. Yet, by default this service is turned on in every install of Windows 2000 or XP.

My advice: Learn to love Zone Alarm, or learn to use any of the great non-Windows operating systems out there.

thank you, i was running zone alarm for a while, then i turned it off because it wasn'tr letting explorer run.
Thank you for your help.

Messenger isn't totally useless - just on the desktop. If you have a big ol' network of computers it's great to be able to shoot messages from one box to another right from the command line. It aids in troubleshooting a great deal (or, just sending nonsense messages from one admin to another to get on their nerves). There are lots of similar tools that are available for BSD and Linux. I have to admit though, the logic in turning on messenger by default in XP Home is seriously tortured. Just another case of how Microsoft obviously isn't interested in thinking about how to give value to their end users, I suppose... actually, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I shut down almost all, if not all, of the services that were running by default in XP Pro AND XP Home... here's one way to do it: shut them all down and then only turn the ones back on that complain about being shut down. If you shut something off and nothing breaks, you didn't need it (and that goes for that lameass "firewall" Microsoft has too).

Yeah, but even then its a real pain. There are many services that you don't know you need, until that critical moment, and usually error messages don't tell such a simple thing as "turn on the Still Image Monitoring service, dummy". (found that out while trying to get my dad's Win2K to work with the scanner).

I guess Messenger does have certain administrative advantages (although I would rather just install SSH for windows), but agreed that it's pretty useless for end users.

At a command prompt (2k/XP) solved all my problems. Practically useless little thing it is. Can get you banned from a college network too...friend of mine decided he'd place a messenger command into a batch loop which repeated every 2 seconds and sent the message to the entire campus workgroup. Not very bright.

Although I have used it on the odd occasion to communicate with and/or scare people...

It's amazing how easy it is to scare people. I even did this on a Unix server. One of the less-knowledgeable guys was working in an SSH terminal, and I logged in, figured out which terminal he was on and piped some scary-sounding text to it: echo "You have been 0wn3d" > /dev/ttyp1

So while he was working, suddenly this text intruded itself right into his shell command. At first he just froze, so I did it again. Then he turned around and called the head Unix guy in the office to take a look. Then I had them both going. Then I laughed, and they got kinda frosty with me. Something like "That's not funny. We don't mess around like that". Oh well, it was still worth it .

For more Linux pranks.

when i was learning Unix we all had shell accounts on the central SCO-Unix box and used normal windows telnet to login. Once I found a core file running around and used write to dump the biatch to someones terminal. Totally munts up the character set and the person had to quit and re-login