For some strange reason, Internet explorer pages keep popping up at random, usually with advertisements. I ran a full system scan with avast and deleted a supposedly "ad generating" virus but the problem continues. The task manager also shows a fair amount of iexplore.exe processes running at one time (which come back eventually after ending them)

I don't use internet explorer ever. i may have opened it once if at all in the several months i've had my laptop. I use google chrome which it came with.