My browser was continually being redirected to the Gary Null natural living web site. This is not a site I've ever visited voluntarily. I tried AdAware, Spybot S&D, Microsoft Antispyware, McAfee, and a few others but the scans kept coming up clean. It was driving me crazy and I posted on a couple of tech support boards without getting much help. When I e-mailed the webmaster over that web site, she said that the problem was caused by a hacker that put a bug on the pogo.com site and that others had contacted pogo and were told how to get rid of it. I don't remember ever going to pogo either, but e-mailed them and they said the problem seems to be happening when people bookmark a web site that they host. They also said they have lots of sites that change often, and they wouldn't help me with it because they don't give advice on anything other than their own software. From looking at chat boards, the bug seems to exploit a problem in the 2004 version of Firefox, which is what I was using.
I removed all the bookmarks since well before the problem started and was free of the problem for over 5 hours. I ran all the scans again, then downloaded the XP SP2 to try to keep that thing and any other junk off. The SP2 crashed the computer and I couldn't even get it to start in safe mode to do a system restore. I had to take off from work to take the computer into town. Fortunately, the computer repairman was able to save my data. The old computer would have cost more than it was worth to repair since it also had another previous problem (refused to copy anything to a disk) so now I have a different computer. It's a slightly used one that he modified and much nicer than the old one, but that dang hacker still caused the death of my other computer!!!!
Beware of what you bookmark. I never heard of bookmarking causing bugs on a computer before, but now I know it's possible.
