Does anyone know what thpswem.exe is

Over the last month or so i have had a problem on my home and work PC's and also a couple of friends. It only seemed to appear after updating to IE7. When i open a browser window or do a search in Google, after a few seconds a full screen pop-up would open. This was usually an advertisment closely related to the search i just performed. If i closed it, it usually wouldn't reappear until i clicked a link or performed another search. I tried using ccleaner, counterspy, spybot etc but nothing made any difference. Then i ran HijackThis which showed a start-up entry for THPSWEM.EXE. I couldn't find any mention of this on the web so i halted the process in task manager and deleted the start-up entry. Lo and behold no more pop-ups. I done the same on the other PC's which stopped it happening on them. The question is has anyone heard of this. There seems to be 4 files in the System32 folder (thpswem.exe, thpswem_nav.dat, thpswem_navps.dat and thpswem.dat) and also 1 file in the Windows/Preftech folder (THPSWEM.EXE-0957B444.pf).
Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Barry

 

Thanks for that. It looks like thats what it was. I always keep my PC clean, regularly running the usual Anti-Spyware programs and HijackThis to check for any suspicious entries. Im pretty paranoid when it comes to malware . This was the first bit of malware ive had in a good while but was annoying me because i couldn't find anything out about it.

Anyway thanks again.

Barry