ok, i'm no fool about pop ups but i can't figure for the life of me how they appear on my girlfriend's computer.

i made sure the windows messenger was disabled, and the firewall was working, then i ran ad-aware and spybot and removed the adware and malware, but that wasn't enough...

i got a pop up getting onto these forums, that's how bad it is...

anyone?

You probably missed some adware. Try downloading Hijack This. Simple little program; instead of searching files and deleting ones it recognizes as malware, it will just give you a list of everything that starts when your computer starts (along with some IE plugins and whatnot). If something looks questionable, look up more about it. If it turns out to be bad, Hijack This can remove the commands that tell it to start. Note that it does not remove the adware from your computer - but adware's pretty much harmless when not started.

Vash, what sort of popup is it?

Also, could you post the hijackthis log here as well.