I posted a message regarding annoying pop-ups that I've been getting lately and I read some really helpful responses - thank you to all. Unfortunately Ad-ware and Spybot have not eliminated the problem. Here's the problem: I get porn pop-ups when I start internet exlporer and also when I view non-porn sites! Is this a trojan horse at work? My internet home page always switches to this "start-space.com" site as well. What the hell? Anyone ever have this problem? What's the fix? Thank you and happy holidays everyone.

You've probably got one (or more) of spyware add-ons on your machine. There are some great removal programs but I'd suggest you download and run Ad-Aware; it's get rid of most annoying things you can get.

And I've not done any "bad" surfing and last ran the program about 2 weeks ago.

Reownload & install the Google Toolbar - it will block the popups

I still get popups with the googlebar.

for about two years and it works quite well.

In the first place, stop using IE. This is were many of your problems originate.
In the second place go to http://www.zonelabs.com/store/application?namespace=zls_catalog&origin=catalog_main.jsp&event=link.bundleDetails&&zl_catalog_view_id=201 and get Zone Alarm Pro, Pest Patrol and Steganos Security. It's well worth the price for the piece of mind and the po-upless surfing.

I don't work for any of these companies, I've just been a happy customer for many years.

ack when I experimented with Kazaa for file sharing, I managed to get spyware files on my puter. I used a spyware washer program which helped a little bit, but I was still getting slammed. I tried a number of pop up blockers but the spyware programs are often designed to work around these, so the blockers offered only marginal help.

Apparently, some spyware are really nasty, they get into your registry the washers don't seem to get rid of them. After I left my PC on one night and woke up to over 100 pop ups the next morning, I finally had all I could take, so.....

I upgraded my Windows 2K to XP which, in the process,formats your hard drive.  Whatever nasty spyware programs were planted on my PC were gone forever! I installed the Google blocker and life is great.

This may seem drastic to some,but it was painless to zip up all my data I wanted to save and install XP, and was totally worth the time/effort.  I'm now totally pop up free and it's GRREEEEAAAAATTT!!!!

I can recomend Spy Sweeper by Webroot, writers of Window Washer and PopUp Washer. I surf all the bad shit and haven't had a pop up or had my browser shanghi'd since... don't remember when. They're not free, but they work. And WindowWasher cleans up EVERYthing... know whadImean?

I use Norton Antivirus and ZoneAlarm (one of my ATF products) and also never click on any popups/programs so when I installed and ran Ad-Aware for the first time and it found over 100 "nasties" in my registry/system it came as quite a shock. The internet is getting to be as dangerous as being downtown at night, drunk and with $100 bills hanging out of your pockets...

Actually that's only a portion of my arsenal. I run Pest Patrol in the background along with automatic scans from McAfee. It takes about 3 minutes for my machine to boot up because of all the firewalls, antivirus and other safety measures I use.

Watch out for Shockwave also. They have Wild Tangent that has been known to set hundreds of spyware cookies on a machine from 1 visit.

...IE particularly on a DOS system has this problem.  The issue is that you need to manually clean up your system.  Under the preferences section, do the following:
1] erase ALL cookies
2] erase all history
3] erase all cache

then, quit explorer, and eliminate any remaining cache from your system by searching for folders with the 'cache' in the title that have to do with IE.  Restart your computor...it should be smooth sailing from there.   For the moment, these issues plague Mac users less since most of the unwanted viral files are not made for Mac (less than 5% of the market).  
The problem is that your cookies give away your surfing patterns no matter how long it has been.