So today I started having an issue with a pop-up type thing opening and then immediately closing, like in a quarter second - so fast I can't even see what it says. It's more like a flash on the screen. It is happening randomly, when I'm on-line or not. I've just noticed that I get the blue circle (the 'I'm working on it' circle thing) by my curser and then like a quick flash near the toolbar right before it pops up then disappears. It's happened like 30 times that I've noticed so far... any thoughts??

Yuck, I don't like the sound of that, it's typical of drive-by downloads sometimes. Best course of action is to use a browser with adbloking such as Chrome with the AdBlockPlus extension, then update your AV and do a full scan. Using th free Malwarebytes products is always a good idea as well.

Is there a color that you can associate with it? If a black square is popping up then the machine is trying to perform a dos function. You see this sometimes when doing an install. A little black screen will pop up and disappear quickly.

Have you made any program changes or has your virus/mlware detected anything lately?

Thanks you two - so I would associate it with a black square, roughly 5''x5'', and in the middle, upper left of the screen (that sounds contradictory, I hope you know what I mean :) ). It just did it! Grrr... I just had Norton put on my computer last Thursday (was using avast before) because I did have a virus thing going on. I don't believe anything has been detected - not sure how to check that? (BTW - I may be pretty darn good at finding info for people, but I'm so not a tech person, so bear with me!) It just did it again!!

Try running SUPERAntiSpyware | Remove Malware | Remove Spyware - AntiMalware, AntiSpyware, AntiAdware! (http://www.superantispyware.com/) and see what that does for you.

The page will take you to the download page and from there, just select the red "Free" button.

Sooo I ended up running my Norton Super Eraser feature (I think that was what it was called... ) and it detected something it labeled as 'bad' and removed it. It's been smooth sailing ever since. Thanks to you all for your input! (Oh - does the term "not sandboxed" mean anything to any of you? Once when I got the popup thing and it paused just long enough for me to read that in the upper left hand corner before it disappeared... )

Glad it seems to be fixed.

As far as "not sandboxed"...HA! Good luck trying to figure that out...read this if you feel like being confused: Sandbox (software development) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_%28software_development%29)