Yes, I am talking about the porn dialers...not popup ads and popup sex ads. Let's not even get into adware and sex popups. That's a whole other realm of torture for basic puter users.

I forgot to mention that I also delete the download from my Limewire shared folder. That's most important. It's not a "true" virus--in the sense that your antivirus software won't pick it up...to the person who asked about that. I did a download (always zip files) and scanned it before opening. A virus never showed. Then I unzipped the file and scanned it again. Then opened it and the dialer activated. This ONLY occurs for me after downloading software through Limewire...and every time.

I think that it's either set up like a virus, or it's what you are downloading...just it's being given the name of the most popular softwares folks are trying to download. You think you're getting a flight simulator, a SIMS game, web creation software...but you're getting this dialer instead. The average person doesn't know how to get it out of their computer.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT CLICK on the dialer when it opens! It seems no matter where you click to close it, that activates it to place a call. Use your task manager to close the danged thing. On my puter, I hold down CTRL with ALT with Delete (all three keys together at the same time). The Task Manager pops up. You see a list of all the programs running at that moment. Hi-lite the darned dialer and click "end program".

Then go clear out all the footprints the thing left in your puter. Security Certificates, temporary files, etc.

Lastly, change the security settings on your system: block the type of certificates (use a higher security level), and set active scripting to "prompt". After a period of time, you can safely put that scripting setting back to normal. You don't want to completely block scripting because a lot of sites you visit use scripts. Yahoo is one of the most popular sites you'll need it for.

When I mention scripting, that's what Steve is referring to when he talks about this thing taking advantage of Internet Explorer to run code on your puter.

I wish you'd have posted the link to the lavasoft thread, Steve, or copied the pertinent part into the discussion here.

And nope...I don't use Limewire anymore. It's not worth the headache with the dialers. I use many other peer-to-peers with no problems at all.