Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from lp.winner.com while browsing on websites that usually don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to sidestep the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the lp.winner.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screen capture on the lp.winner.com pop-up from my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the lp.winner.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the website you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the lp.winner.com pop-ups in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the lp.winner.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

lp.winner.com resolves to the 54.164.156.213 IP address and winner.com to 37.153.102.203.

So, how do you remove the lp.winner.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the lp.winner.com ads I had istartsurf, MedPlayerNewVersion and Movie Wizard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the lp.winner.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with this type of pop-up 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 lp.winner.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the lp.winner.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows Operating System you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the lp.winner.com pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to identify and uninstall the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not crippled like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems deciding if a file is safe or unwanted in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

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

Thank you!