My home computer and some co-workers’ computers have been hit with some pernicious adware: obnoxious pop-ups in Internet Explorer, displaying ads from belgiandip.com. Spybot didn’t help get rid of it. (I didn’t try AdAware until after I’d already dealt with it manually.)

I searched Google for “belgiandip” and found this suggestion. It seemed to help. Here’s how to do what I did:

1. Open an explorer window on C:\Windows\System32, set it to the Details view.
2. Right-click on the column headers to add another column. In the More... list at the bottom is Company. Select it, then sort by that column.
3. Scroll down to “totempole” in the Company list. I found four .exe files, all 64K in size, all of which said in the properties that OriginalFileName was “pup.exe”.
4. Delete them all (one was running: find it in the Task manager and kill it, then delete the file).
5. Do the same thing for the C:\Windows directory.
6. In the registry, in HK_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, find the entry corresponding to the exe that was running, and delete the entry.