Unwanted search box pop up

Hello,

Do you recognize the pop-up shown in this screenshot? It repeatedly appears when I am doing online searches. It is not really that helpful and is actually quite annoying since, as you can see here, it obscures the drop-down information normally associated with a particular site.

FYI, I use IE8 exclusively. I have looked in the IE options areas for ways to disable it but have not been successful. The fact is, that I'm not really sure if it is part of IE or some other annoying software that has found its way onto my system.

Any help or information would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Steve_BradyAsked: 2011-03-09

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LVL 8

lancecurwensvilleCommented: 2011-03-09

What search pages are you using that it pops up in. There are some ajax scripts that some websites are using that look similar to that. Regardless, I would recommend running a scan with malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org and cleaning out your temp files with CCleaner from www.piriform.com .

LVL 10

pjasnosCommented: 2011-03-09

I would also recommend switching to a more modern browser. Possibilities:
http://www.getfirefox.com
http://www.opera.com
http://www.google.com/chrome
and others

LVL 7

DIIRECommented: 2011-03-10

What happens if you click on the little cog on the bottom right of the popup.

Does it tell you what the software is called or have settings to disable it.

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Steve_BradyAuthor Commented: 2011-03-11

>>What happens if you click on the little cog on the bottom right of the popup.

Good suggestion. It hadn't occured to me that the little cog was a button. However, clicking on it resulted in this:

I googled acpro and found out the program is called AutoCompletePro. Further googling led to these helpful pages:
http://www.autocompletepro.com/
http://comprolive.com/remove/unwanted/applications/autocompletepro
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-files/can-i-delete-dangerous-win-xp-autocomplete-pro/c63f1804-3c63-4672-9a4c-7ca235e6f10f

Once I knew the name, I was able to uninstall it in my control panel.

Thanks

Steve_BradyAuthor Commented: 2011-03-11

>>pjasnos:
I would also recommend switching to a more modern browser. Possibilities:
http://www.getfirefox.com
http://www.opera.com
http://www.google.com/chrome
and others

Thanks for the suggestions. I was running firefox for a while but did not like it because it slowed everything down. I am curious about the other two but will ask about them in a new thread.

Thanks

LVL 10

pjasnosCommented: 2011-03-11

Google Chrome is probably the fastest you can get.

New version of Firefox ( 4) is coming this month and it is also much faster than older versions.