Emerald Green Software

When you're browsing on the internet, even with the good popup blockers incorporated into every modern browser, a few will get through. And when you get rid of them, you have to be careful because not all popup's are benign. One favorite malevalent popup looks a lot like the standard alert window and reads "Warning, your computer is infected with Spyware! Please Run a full scan" Or "Please click here to download Spyware remover."

Naturally, clicking yes will usually INSTALL spyware on your system, and often also a "Spyware removal" Program that does nothing useful, but keeps putting up big messages of how you need to pay to set up the full version.

And the nasty thing is that some of the malware writers have mannaged to set up commands to try and interpret anything, including clicking the shutdown button in the top right corner of the popup as a command to download the malware.

Fortunately, there's a very simple way to shut down the problematic window without actually clicking it. In the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, a separate item opens for each separate window. Moving the mouse over the item and clicking it will reveal the menu.  As you can see, it not only offers a way to close the program, but also reminds you of the keyboard shortcut to do so(The Alt key is by default next to the keyboard, and the F4 key is above the number keys.  You work the shortcut by holding down the Alt key and the tapping the F4 key).  Clicking Close should shut down the popup without problem.  You can also use the keyboard shortcut to shut down the popup, but you have to first bring the popup to the front of the screen by clicking it?s button on the taskbar  (Which is why I tend to use the right button..

Either option will usually be all you need.  However sometimes, a popup can be engineered so that it's even harder to close, generating authorization requests that can disrupt the right click menu trick.  Now with a little patience and judicious use of Alt+Tab to target the bad stuff, you can use to Alt and F4 shortcut to whittle down the authorizations and popup's anyway's.  But if you can't remember the correct keyboard shortcuts (I usually have to right click to look it up myself), there's a fast alternative.  Ctrl+Alt+Del.

A lot of windows users called Ctrl+Alt+Del the three fingered salute back when it was used mainly as a shortcut to shut down the system in the earliest windows version.  In the modern operating system though it's much more versatile.  Holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys  (Which should both be on the same line as the spacebar), you then tap the Del or Delete key.  In XP this loads the Task Manager, in Vista you get a list of several options, including to load the task manager.

In any case, what you want to do is open the task manager.  It's actually a very useful program that not only let's you look at various programs running on your system, but also lets you review hidden processes, check how your system's performing and more.

But for now the goal is to kill the popup.  I'm demonstrating with a benign popup of course, but the task manager is also the best way of killing malicious popup's too.  Just click the popup so it's highlighted, then click the End Task button at the bottom of the task manager window.  If there's anything making it tricky to shut down the program it might open a message window saying that the program isn't responding and asking if you want to shut it down or wait.  Clicking Shut Down will basically override all the tricks and shut down the popup without offering any chance for other built in tricks to try to start.