I persisted to ignore the popup but eventually gave in ... I had to restart and ...then it occurred to me
IF malware is installed, and (forgive my adolescent understanding of things) the guy outside in a van is watching my net play and/or snatching my data ...
and then I realize ... wait a minute ... THAT was a stupid thing for me to do ...
If I uninstall what I fear is a phisher, does the guy in the van say, "shit" .. and drive over to the next block to attack my friend ?
Or am I screwed because once he's got it, he's got it ?
I use Norton
Restarting your computer may have locked the malware in.
Run CCleaner. If something’s there, it’ll find it and take care of it.
It appeared to leave.
Just to be sure, I did a Restore point anyway.
Or you could also recover to a back up from a couple days ago.
It depends on the kind of malware.
There are a some relatively innocuous ad-ware programs that you can uninstall in the normal manner, but that is the minority. Most malware you will not be able to uninstall with the regular procedure, and even if you could uninstall it, they usually come packaged with viruses and trojans that can reinstall the software automatically.
Any time I experience something that might have gotten past my standard AV software, I got to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ and run their house call program.
Trend Micro’s Housecall is an exceptionally good fix for all sorts of malware and adware.
http://www.malwarebytes.org
Those are the two "nags" that really get people into trouble.
Microsoft
Malicious Software Removal Tool
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/malicious-software-removal-tool-details.aspx
It depends, some uninstall fairly clean, most don’t. Of course you have Norton which is probably worse than most malwares. Of course Flash did do a big update recently, so that might not have even been malware, but that does open up the whole discussion on Flash being an unstable resource hog.
Be advised, this is not an "instant" fix, they are volunteers and you'll have to invest some time and have patience, (usually a couple of days was my experience ).
It's free and they're good at what they do.
Here's a link on how to get started.
Depends on what “uninstall” means to you. A piece of malware may be removed from the executable startup list, but that alone doesn’t mean the malware itself has been erased completely from the HDD. It may also be partially “uninstalled” in that some processes of the malware no longer start, but some others continue to start in the background and eat up memory. Also malware usually changes the registry in one or more ways and those effects usually linger until they are manually cleaned up.
Often it helps to manually check under the hood, so to speak to see what is going on. Run msconfig and then look under the startup tab to see what is actually starting when you boot. If there are weird, unidentifiable things starting, you can turn them off temporarily or permanently. Also check under the services tab. Usually things with no manufacturer name raises a red flag.
And any website that says you need some video player to view their content--run, you can find that content elsewhere.
Just my 2¢ for folks clicking in here.
4 years with an iMac.
Zero problems.
Your best bet is to go to a different computer to download two or three different free emergency antivirus CD/DVD bootable disk images. Go through the process to write them to disks. Make sure your system can boot directly from CD/DVD and load them.
They will be running Linux and will therefore not allow any Windows virus to interfere with your system getting cleaned.
I favor Avira as at least one of the choices.
Once your system is clean, choose your antivirus from reviews on this site:
av-comparatives.org
Happy cleaning.