Lazy, I did not install superfish.  How it got on the system, I can't say.  I did check the removal websites and looked for the directories that are supposed to be associated with superfish and they do not exist. 

I get the sense you are very offended so let me apologize to you for whatever I said that offends  you.  I was educated here in this thread that the problem was not created or caused by DAZ or Rendo and I believe I have correctly agreed now that what looked like something genuine is now indeed understood by me to be a fake.

Please keep in mind that adware is particularly devious in how it installs and often will install without the user knowing.  I'm not sure that I would call that the user's fault.  If someone out there works very hard to commit fraud, the victim probably ought not to be blamed.  If it were true that a victim is always at fault then we live in a very sad world.  I believe the fault is the company and the programmers that created the install and took the good name of DAZ and Renderosity.

Now it is true that a computer owner ought to learn about safe browsing and in doing so, can minimize the exposure.  I read where a substantial percentage of websites have unwanted code in them.  It is a big enough problem that companies like Norton and Avast and Malwarebytes, etc, are constantly releasing updates (almost daily) to try and protect against this problem.  I did my part by purchasing those programs and I use them.  Avast Pro has a web shield and it has been active since I bought this system.  Users are often taken unaware and duped, as in this case.  All I can do is recant my irritable comment, apologize, and share what I did to try and deal with it.

I hope that some day you be able to understand what I said here.

 

Khai, yeah, I do sort of wonder if something was left behind.  It seems to be deactivated.  While the popup was active, I often saw net traffic and CPU usage when the system was idle.  That could be any number of things from legitimate services running to adware.  If I can get to the resmon fast enough I can see what is triggering the useage, but often it just says "system" without enough detail to know anything more.  My hosts files are clean, I checked those manually.

I did run Avast pro and malwarebytes, as I said above, and neither found the program.  I do not ever recall seeing a shopper toolbar and none show up in activex or program manager or add ons in any of my browsers or windows uninstall areas.  So this weekend I might try to learn more about superfish and see if I can locate anything left behind that might be silently active.

Freinds, if there is a lesson to be learned here, its that even semi-savvy computer users can be taken advantage of unawares.  Some of the adware is pretty sophisticated.  Even emails that look like they came from ebay or the bank or the ISP can be fraud.  I often hover the mouse over a link to see where it wants to go before going there, which is how I realized that this DAZ / Rendo popup was trying to direct me elsewhere.  Maybe it was legit, but we have learned it is not.

I hope the hostility can die down now.