Alright so I'm having a seriously annoying issue with popups coming through my internet explorer. Trouble is... I use firefox. I do not have IE open, but the ieexplorer.exe process opens itself on its own and uses up a ton of memory and processor power to send me these really annoying popups that often include sound clips and wake me up at night if I forget to turn my speakers off. This adversely affects my computer's performance due to a huge amount of processor power and ram being devoted to sending me these massive fullscreen popup ads.

can anyone help me get rid of them?

You have adware.

Spybot
Ad-Aware
HijackThis + http://hijackthis.de

yeah thats the issue..

I run these programs once a week at least (all three that you mentioned in fact) and they are all updated to the most recent updates that I can get

but it doesnt fix the problem

But do they find things when you run them? There are many malware programs out there that are detectable by those programs but not necessarily removable. If at least one of them is repeatedly finding the same thing and cleaning doesn't get rid of it, let us know what it is.

ad-aware is pretty consistently getting rid of everything it finds

I ran it earlier today and deleted some stuff, and then just ran it a bit ago and there was no recurrance of shit, same with hijackthis (everything it brought up was stuff that my computer needs to run programs correctly.. no erroneous things that I dont know what they are)

the troubling thing seems to be spybot. the shit it finds when I scan comes up over and over and over... but the only problem is that they are all just cookies for websites that have firefox folder destinations on them... so clearly my programs are not catching whatever is causing IE to run rampant in the background.

is firefox set as the default client to load web pages and associated extensions?
also have you tried running the scans in safe mode?

Do you have Spybot's immunization on?

Check all your startup programs and browser helper objects in spybot. Remove anything that you don't need, especially if it looks very suspicious

I've really nuked the hell out of my computer over the last two days with all these programs... I rebooted my computer just now.. no popups so far

I'll let you guys know tomorrow if any popups come up when I leave firefox open overnight

edit: woke up to a computer completely locked up by popups (any other ideas?)