I have a question for thouse who know much more about computers than I do. My friend's computer has been being bombarded with pop-ups when Internet Explorer is started, so tonight we downloaded and ran Ad-aware 6, which found 404 objects it said were problematic. We quarantined all 404 objects and it was able to do all but eight, which it said couldn't be done until the computer was restarted. It asked if we wanted it to quarantine them on the next restart and we said okay and restarted the computer. When Windows came up, none of the desktop icons appeared and Ad-aware 6 ran and found the eight items. Instead of allowing us to quarantine them, it just allowed us to hit next. When it finished running all the desktop icons came up and we tried to run Internet Explorer and it gave us the generic windows unable to find server page. His Windows Messenger service couldn't connect to the internet anymore and all other internet programs couldn't connect. We restarted the computer and when we tried to run the programs again, the same problem came up. We went back to ad-aware 6 and restored the quarantined files. After restoring the files, all the internet programs except for Internet Explorer worked fine. Internet Explorer still gives us the generic error page though. We tried restarting the computer again with the same results, everything except for Internet Explorer works fine.
Does anyone here know what happened wrong and more important, how to fix it?
He's running Windows XP, broadband cable connection and I think it's Internet Explorer 6 (provided by Comcast).
It's late and I'm tired, so I apologize if I am rambling or if something isn't as clearly stated as possible. Thanks in advance for any help that is given.