Adware trouble

[PlutonianEmpire]

Stupid me opened up an innocent-looking piece of mail in my spam folder.

Now, there's popups everytime I connect to the internet. I have used norton, ad-aware, and spysweeper, but to no avail. Damned popups keep on coming.

At one time, norton detected a persistant trojan horse that wouldn't go away, and I had to restart into safe mode. Now, I can't even acces my recycle bin properly, and it's only a matter of time before the whole thing come crashing down and I have to reformat the hd all over again.

Can anyone help?

And where can I find and access my laptop's Hosts File?

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

What version of Ad-Aware are you trying to use? If you are using 6.0 Upgrading to SE is usually an easy way to fix it. The reference files for 6.0 are not being updated, so they could be a couple months old by now.

Also, what version of Windows do you have?

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I have the freeware version of "Ad-Aware SE Personal."

I use windows XP, Service pack 2.