I did a major cleaning.  Mostly manual.  Found the offending directory "installation assistant."  Yeah, like I need help installing things.  :)  I remember seeing that in the windows program uninstall and did uninstall but it was a fake, the directory remained and continued to spam.  When I deleted the directory and all references in the registry this issue cleared up a bit more.

I pulled a lot of stuff out of the registry and it wasn't just the application.  Took a while to search the registry for all the known keys.   Found torrent, and a few others.  I don't use P2P or anything like that.

cnet might have been involved.  I watch the check boxes pretty close but who knows, maybe I missed one.  I do use cnet from time to time and will be weary from now on.

I hope Renderosity and DAZ takes the time to go after these people who used the logo and names.  Shortly after this event I got emails and notices from Rendo about coupons.  DAZ offers the same from time to time.  Whoever concocted this scheme spent some time to learn who their victims were and did a great job of scamming.

My computer guy told me to enable PUP blocking in Avast.  Apparently there are some legitimate uses of this, which is why it is disabled by default.  I don't think I need this so it is now a part of the scan.