Did you just get a popup from lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com and ponder where it came from? Did the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.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 lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s a screenshot of the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my system:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The advertisements are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com removal in this blog post.

I found the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com pop-up on one of the lab systems 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 anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com resolves to the 23.3.13.50 address. lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com was registered on 2009-06-04.

So, how do you remove the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com ads I had gosearch.me, Live Malware Protection, SmartComp Safe Network and Windows Menager installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com 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 popped up 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.empire.goodgamestudios.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.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 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 suspicious listed 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 observing the lp.empire.goodgamestudios.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to identify and remove 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 about 8 years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually track down and remove 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 crippled 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 troubles determining if a file is safe or unsafe in the FreeFixer 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:

Here’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

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

Thank you!