WARNING: DO NOT respond by telling me to use a different browser. It's not gonna happen, for a variety of reasons. Find someone else to preach to about the joys of your favorite non-MS product.

This sounds odd but it's the actual sequence of events, I swear:

Re-booted the machine yesterday after lunch. It gagged on something - I forget exactly which app it was.

Ran Ad-Aware after rebooting. Found 76 items. Removed them.

Immediately upon opening IE, I was plagued by pop-ups like I haven't been for several months. Prior to yesterday, the MSN toolbar was catching almost everything and I had no complaints.

Removed MSN toolbar and re-installed it. No luck.

This morning I removed MSN toolbar again and replaced it with Google toolbar. Still no luck. Ad-Aware found 84 new items this morning, less than 24 hours after the last time I ran it.

Any thoughts as to what might have happened, and how I can fix the problem given the restriction that I'm not changing browser?

There's obviously some stuff on your PC Ad-Aware is not catching (could also be a virus, do you have a virus scanner?). There are several other anti-spyware programs out there for you to try, but a thread on this has been opened in this forum only a few days ago, so check that one.

I agree with Tal. It sounds like a trojan, or something may be on your system, letting adware in. Also, check the coolweb threads started here. This malware, and a few others like it, will often remain undetected, installing "secondary" files which cause the pop-ups etc. Ad-aware finds, and cleans, the secondary symptoms, but fails to catch the primary.

Have you checked in msconfig under startup to see if there's some program that's starting up/installing itself every time you reboot. If it is then though you remove it with Ad-aware then it keeps coming back.

Start up in safe mode, and use more than just Ad-aware. Once you're logged in and in safe mode, run both of the fully-updated malware removers and you should have "the win". :rolling: :rolling: :rolling:

Trying to resist, but there's no use. Rallymama, do not enter this link. Everyone else should.

http://browsehappy.com/

There is actually a type of spyware that stops popup blockers from working. I had this problem but I used spybot and ad-aware to remove these and other types of spyware.

Try www.download.com (http://www.download.com)

There is also Pop-Up Stopper Free Edition which might also be useful in stopping pop-ups...and you can get it here:

http://www.panicware.com/product_psfree.html

And maybe having a firewall might also help in case you don't have one...

again, dunno how old this is, but in addition to adware, I'd try different spyware removal apps. Spysweeper is my favorite. You can get a 30 day free trial from www.webroot.com, (http://www.webroot.com,) or for a completely free one, find spybot 1.3 on www.download.com. (http://www.download.com.)

As always, update the definitions regularly.

P.S. since you are deadset on using IE, the google toolbar is hands down the best pop-up blocker there is, plus the google search engine is always with you.

She already used the Google toolbar and it can be disabled by certain types of spyware.

You should use a different browser. Try Netscape or Mozilla. Really