@NER:
I googled this and I tried everything several seemingly trusted sites told me to no avail, so please help me wit this, AP computer gods. :(
This should be a simple malware issue. I downloaded an untrusted software because I was in a rush (had an event to run and had to convert numbers in an excel sheet into contacts and stuff)
So what this did is it changed the whole layout of my windows bar and every time I browse the internet it would be full of ads and random pages would randomly open to show even more ads.
I uninstalled everything and that reverted the bars to normal, what I couldn't stop despite using a multitude of malware detectors (hitman pro, malwarebytes, adwcleaner, downloading Bitdefender total security and doing several full scans) are the ads that show on youtube and other pages, the ads that would randomly start IE and sometimes even chrome, and the random ad pages I would be redirected to when browsing the internet. what bitdefender and malwarebytes seem to be doing now is blocking the ads from "showing" but they still take the space they do on pages like youtube and they do initially open but they are blocked and I cannot click on them.
an example on the space the ads take now: http://prnt.sc/ez2lvmtl;dr browsers being redirected to adsites and I cannot find the source no matter how hard I try, used all malware detecting softwares I could. pls help
download avast antivirus and run a boot scan and a full scan. hopefully the boot scan will catch any rootkits you may have installed and the full scan will catch the adware.
after that, uninstall all of your browsers and delete all of their data if you can.
if that didn't work, then back up your important data on any partition other than the one that has windows installed on it, usually the (D), then format and reinstall windows on the (C) partition only. you may want to scan the (D) partition after doing that too.
و اصحى الفار لا يعضك
lol be careful next time man.
Cinder