Did you just get a pop-up from promo.gala.se and wonder where it came from? Did the promo.gala.se ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the promo.gala.se pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s a screenshot of the promo.gala.se pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

If you also see this on your machine, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the promo.gala.se ads. Contacting the site owner of the site you currently were browsing would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you remove the promo.gala.se pop-up in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from your machine.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the promo.gala.se pop-up on one of these lab systems.

So, how do you remove the promo.gala.se pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the promo.gala.se ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the promo.gala.se pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the promo.gala.se ads removal:

1. Examine what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also check the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the promo.gala.se pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!