Did you just get a pop-up from imvu.com and wonder where it came from? Did the imvu.com ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the imvu.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s how the imvu.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

Does this sound like your story, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the imvu.com ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you with the imvu.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated some of my lab computers and purposely installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the behaviour on these systems to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the imvu.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

imvu.com resolves to 204.225.145.58.

So, how do you remove the imvu.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the imvu.com ads I had Live Malware Protection, SmartComp Safe Network, Windows Menager and gosearch.me installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the imvu.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The problem with pop-ups like this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the imvu.com pop-up ads you need to review your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you installed in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did this blog post help you to remove the imvu.com popup ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!