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

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you presumably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the mcafeestore.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the web site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the mcafeestore.com removal in this blog post.

I found the mcafeestore.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 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.

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

TinyWallet was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. I could see this since it was kind enough to label the pop-up ad with the adware name: “Ads by TinyWallet“. I’ve highlighted that label in the screenshot at the top of the blog post.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share by posting a comment below.

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the mcafeestore.com pop-up ads you need to check your machine 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 mcafeestore.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 dubious 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 getting the mcafeestore.com pop-ups.

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

I think you will be able to track down 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 designed 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 locked like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems determining if a file is clean 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 information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

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

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

Thank you!