Did you just get a pop-up from ashleymadison.com and wonder where it came from? Did the ashleymadison.com ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the ashleymadison.com 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 screengrab of the ashleymadison.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my system:

If this description sounds like your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the ashleymadison.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the ashleymadison.com removal in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware responsible for the pop up.

I found the ashleymadison.com pop-up on one of the lab computers where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

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

The problem 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.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the ashleymadison.com pop-up ads you need to examine your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the ashleymadison.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows 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 suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the ashleymadison.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often turn up under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to find 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 track down and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the ashleymadison.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!