Ok...I've FINNALY figured out what was causing this damn problem.

www.gratisware.com is the guilty party. One of these zillion popups that kept coming up I finally see something in the title bar that says 'bought to you by gratisware' .. so I goto there web page and there is an 'uninstall' program you can download - after you fill out some info. They had a comment field and I sorta gave them a piece of my mind as nicely as I could...

The thing is...that there was nothing on the machine that I could identify with this extreamly harmfull piece of software. Obviously something somewhere installed it...probably with a piece of shareware, but non-the-less there was no way I ever would of found it without the lucky break of that title bar on that one popup, and I've dealt with the problem for days and spent many hours on it.

It would seem to me that there should be someone I can complain to about this besides them. I plan to write them a letter and/or send some email to them, but considering this has cost me AT LEAST 15 hours worth of billing time (and probably a lot more considering how many times this damn thing caused my machine to crash) writing a letter just doesn't seem enough. I'm open to sugestions if anyone has any.

Thanks!