"Test.exe" popups every 5 seconds

Hello: My name is Dave. Thanks for considering my problem. I have a Dell 9300 that I bought used about 6 months ago to use for graphic designing. It came with Win XP Home Ed SP1, IE6.xx and Mozilla FF 2.xx on it. I upgraded it with SP2 from the MS site and increased the RAM to 2GB to run my Illustrator program. All was well until about 2 weeks ago when I uninstalled a game program called Everquest. The uninstall went fine thru add/remove prgms in the control panel. When I rebooted the laptop and opened Internet Explorer I got an error popup "Test.exe" is not a valid image that repeatedly opens up over and over again. I closed IE and tried Firefox. It would not even open. I had put Mcafee on the unit right after I got it. (It came free with my Cox internet service.) When I called them they acted like they couldn't fix it and told me there was a problem with my operating system. I figured they were just blowing me off because I am not a paying subscriber or something so I went into safe mode and downloaded Spybot S&D. It found about 700 problems and managed to remove most of them after 3 scans and repairs. When I rebooted and scanned again in normal ops I had the Test.exe popup back. I ran Spybot again and found the wowfx.dll Trojan was there and it had replicated most of the other trojans that Spybot had just removed. I shut down the laptop and disconnected from the internet and ran spybot again after restart. It cleaned it up and after I restarted without the ethernet connected No popups happened. I shut down again and reconnected the internet and when I started back up and opened IE the popups came back. So far I have tried Spybot S&D, Superantispyware, Kapersky, AdAware, and STF(?) Cleaner. I can get online in safe mode and download okay (as I did these prgms.) They all run okay and find the trojans and remove them but as soon as I go back to normal boot up I begin getting the popups and the same wowfx.dll (or whatever alias it has been dubbed by the particular prgm I am finding it with) is back. I'm not a newb. I started out with a Commodore Vic20. But I'm not anything near a programmer either. I'm really just a graphics designer. I've had other bugs before but usually one of the prgms will kill it. I've been on a few other forums looking for this problem and each one that I have found warn against using the particular instructions being given for anything but that individual problem. Please, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Dave

[external image: Posted Image] Haitidave,

We hope you enjoy being a member here at WTT.

Please go to New Members and follow the advice to post a HJT log to the correct forum so an accredited Malware volunteer can read you log and give you the all clear on any Malware you may have.

Once cleared of Malware, feel free to post back here for further help if need be as we will be pleased to help.

kind regards,