A friend's machine was doing that.
I did the Ctrl-alt-del salute to bring up the close program dialog while the machine was booting, and shutdown programs manually to the bare minimum required to operate.
I then ran Ad-Aware SE, and Spybot.
Repeatedly.
Before I diod that, literally her machine would boot and then have the 'hundred thousand pop-up' thing happen.
Now it will run and not try to call Zambia.