Why does dial-up box keep appearing?

[David Evermann]

Hey everyone,
First time poster, apologies for my lack of technical input.
I live in a student house and we run the internet (broadband) through a LAN, and up until a few days ago it was working fine.
All of a sudden, despite having perfect connection, the dial-up box keeps popping up every time I click on a new web page in i-explorer. It then proceeds not to load the new page until I close thew dial up, when another box comes up saying 'connect' or 'work offline'. If i click 'connect', it loads the page perfectly.
It's never done this before, I dont understand why it would start now.
Is it a problem with IE or is it adware? I run ad-aware personal edition, have a zone alarm firewall and dont tend to frequent dodgy sites, all produce nothing.
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post.
Gosh that was long-winded.

CHeers,
Dave.

[Flame]

Well, you have a firewall, but what about an antivirus program?

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[Dave Evermann]

I use AVG antivirus free edition. Everything seems clean, except sometimes ad-aware comes up with several critical objects after the occasional restart. Would a Hijack this log help?
Thanks again.
Dave.

[Flame]

Well.... You can submit to us your hijack log if you want to... I'm not sure that it would help much though... Also, did you have software installed on your computer at one point, that might be trying to dial out? (AOL, etc.)

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[Zzyzx]

Start IE, click Tools, then the Connections tab. Tick the "Never Dial  A Connection" box, Apply, then OK.

Like Flame said, if this just happened out of the blue, scan for  viruses and adware.

Hope this helps.  

[David Evermann]

Thank you everyone, it's fixed now.

Keep up the sterling work.

Dave.