A popup with a title of add/remove programs shows up. sometimes pornographic popups also, and it slows down my computer, sometimes making it freeze. what is this?

could i edit registr?

My Dell Latitude came with XP Media Edition, and I do not have an original disc. It has slowed to a crawl, I get error messages on opening apps, and nothing helps (clean disc, virus scan, spyware scan, clean registry). My only recourse is to start anew. I have an XP upgrade CD, but I want to re-format and do a clean install.

I don’t want to manually regedit search and destroy references to programs I’ve removed. Can’t registry cleaners do that for me?