How do you get rid of it... the same thing happened to me months ago.. and I can't get rid of it... it overrode my Comcast homepage...

Follow Elin Woods to Europe, the EU dropped today its browser-based antitrust charges against Microsoft,

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hG2CfCNAqdPhFu-F-Ubnx7ZCBNhgD9CKEB900

"Microsoft will avoid further EU fines if it provides a pop-up screen that lets European users — from March — replace Microsoft's Internet Explorer or add another browser such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome."

I wonder how much further along we'd be today if the antitrust enforcers had the gumption to stand to Billy Boy when Microsoft used its monopoly control of the pipeline to roll over Lotus Development, WordPerfect and Netscape.

it overrode my Comcast homepage...

Hee.

...and, once there, it will carefully block you from downloading Firefox. Evil.

How do you get rid of it...

I don't think you can. I think since the first version of XP came out IE has been integrated with automatic updates. I think the best you can do is delete all the shortcuts so it never gets used accidentally. Even downloading the 5 billion patches and updates MS released, I was still getting malware with IE.

I had this problem with my old PC. That's partly why I'm typing this on a Mac right now.

It's a consistent user interface: "Let's interrupt this customer now and every few minutes about
- unused desktop icons
- antivirus updates"
"Now, let's give this customer an unintelligible error message"
"We'll give him options without explaining the consequences, except where he might want options, where we'll make sure there are none."
"Let's give this customer a pop-up window now with meaningless, redundant or irrelevant information, like how strong the wireless connection is."
And so on.

Allan, "customer" is a pretty loose term when speaking of MicroSoft ... few of the many millions of the burdened would have chosen to use a MS product had it not come installed. As a friend of mine puts it, MicroSoft is a junkyard dog law firm with a sideline in malware.