hi, someone installed gator and other adware that bogged down my friends system and caused pop ups to happen often. I tried to remove most of it through the control panel and what I couldn't do from there I deleted manually and removed references in the registry. I got things working just fine except for an initial startup error message. when I went back to fix(and did) but I kept going to remove every reference. I proceeded to remove more references to something called superbar.dll and now logging off takes 2 or 3 minutes and IE keeps saying 'detecting proxy setting', while before logging on and off was a few seconds. It takes the longest on the 'saving settings', where can I look to see whats taking so long.

Kevin, It sounds like you attempted to clean manually in areas that really ought to be handled by well designed cleaning tools. My fav is Iolo's System Mechanic. You failed to tell us what OS you are working on (for shame!). Try Sys Mech but before you run it make sure to use it's Registry Backup to backup whole registry. G'luck, jp