Random Ads Playing in Background

[Zoom7000]

A staff member brought her laptop in with an unusual problem that I have never come across. It randomly plays audio adverts in the background at random intervals and sometimes plays them for a few seconds up to a minute or so in length. I've had a look in Task Manager and there are 2 unexplained processes for IEXPLORE.EXE running. Everytime I manually close them, they start up again.

 

I have run a full MSE scan, a full MRT scan and a full Malwarebytes scan and everything has shown up as clean with no infections.

 

MSCONFIG is looking fine and nothing in the Startup folder or Scheduled Tasks.

 

Any ideas how to remove these annoying ads?

[Dom_]

Tried hijackthis?

[gtg93]

Seen this problem a few times... Spybot or Combofix usually sort it.

[featured_spectre]

spybot does the job on this, basically she inadvertently installed malware

[gjdb]

Malwarebytes full scan and superantispyware full scan, never failed on me to clean an infected machine.

[tumbleweed]

autoruns from sysinternals - will usually find just about anything dubious.

[powdarrmonkey]

Don't trust the machine. Always reinstall from known good media, rescuing only what files you absolutely have to.

[Duke5A]

I cleaned this a few weeks ago off of a friend's machine. Had the exact same problem, spawning a pair of IE processes and playing audio advertisements in the background without them actually being visible. Someone is trying to run up their click-count on web ads.

 

I made a couple of passes, first was a MalwareBytes scan booted from a BartPE disc, then with Security Essentials, and finally ComboFix. The first two methods, while finding a lot and removing it, don't seem to be able to deal with root kits all that well. ComboFix dealt with the ever spawning IE processes.