Minor Adware... and Spybot is unable to "see" any activex controls.

[Windsurfer]

Hi there, First time poster. I hope I'm posting this in the right section.

For the past few weeks, I have been receiving a few IE pop up ads. They seem to occur whenever applications such as MSN access the internet (but don't trust me on that...). However, they are few and far between. I use the computer about 5 hours a day, and I get maybe 1 pop up every few days.
The pop up is either for a survey site, or buysell.com. I have tried doing a boot-time scan with spybot, but it has found no spyware at all. I tried looking at my ActiveX controls, but Spybot seems to be unable to "see" them. Could it be possible that my Spybot install has been corrupted?
I have tried downloading a fresh copy of Spybot from another computer, as well as the definition files, and installing them, but nothing has changed.
Thanks in advance.

[spybotsandra]

Hello,

There are pop-ups caused/displayed by malware on users' systems, most pop-ups are implemented by websites and are are not causing any harm. The former pop-ups come up randomly and even with no website visited, the latter pop-ups do only come up when visiting the website that implemented it. As I said, the latter pop-ups do not affect your system and are "just" an annoyance. Thus, I will recommend some (free) pop-up blockers to you:

First thing to mention is, that there are alternatives to Internet Explorer, which should be considered, as - for example - Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/) or Opera (http://www.opera.com).
Both of these are supposed to provide faster, safer and more efficient browsing than other browsers.
What is more: they come with an integrated pop-up blocking function, which means they stop annoying pop-up ads automatically. And, of course, Firefox as well as Opera are freeware.

However, if you want to stay with IE, you can try some other solution. I recommend to have a look at the following page:
http://www.popupcheck.com/pop_up_blocker.asp
There, you will find the results of the Free Pop Up Blockers tests. You'll also notice that Mozilla Firefox covers fifth position.

From my point of view, the Google Toolbar is also recommendable. You can also consider Proxomitron: http://www.proxomitron.info/
or Webwasher http://www.cyberguard.com/products/webwasher/webwasher_products/classic/index.html .
I'll leave the choice to you, they are all ok.
Hope it helps :)

Best regards
Sandra
Team Spybot

[Windsurfer]

Sorry, I forgot to mention the "crux" of this problem. I don't use IE except for windows and Microsoft updates, and even then, I use shortcuts. I pretty much exclusively use Firefox.

[Windsurfer]

No? Anyone have any idea what could cause spybot to stop being able to see ActiveX controls?