Linksys Wireless Issue

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The scene:
I’ve had my home networked without issue for quite some time. I use a Linksys Wireless Router WRT54GX4. There are two laptops and a desktop using wireless connectivity, and two desktops that are wired. I regularly use (and using now) a wired connection.

The problem:
For the last several days, I keep getting a popup on my screen while I am using a browser. It happens regardless of which browser I am using. The popup is pictured below. Up to now, I’ve just clicked cancel and continued on. It has no effect on my connection to the internet and it has no effect on my connection to the other PC’s in the house. It’s just annoying and I cannot explain why this is happening all of a sudden. It pops up every 3-4 minutes.

What did I do:
It seems the problem began immediately after I used CCleaner a few days ago. I hate to blame that product; after all, I’ve been using it for ages without issue, and I really didn’t do anything different this time. It could just be a coincidence.

Question:
Has anyone else seen this or know what I should do to keep this popup from recurring? I’m not even sure why I would want to enter a username and password for the router… Initially, it had to be done to do the installation settings, but there’s no reason I need to go back into the settings now?

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Tricky,

One very scary possibility is that the DNSChanger mentioned in post 715,881 is trying to reconfigure your router!

StuartR

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Stuart – Thanks for the heads up. I use Avast as my AV program and it’s always up to date. I’m currently running the latest versions of Spybot and Ad-Aware Pro, just to see if they turn up anything. I’m sure hoping I haven’t picked up the nasty virus that you’ve pointed out. I was trying to think of what else I might have done to “cause” this to happen, and something else occurred to me; in the last several days, I reinstalled Google Earth. And even though I tried to prevent it, I think it auto-installed a Google Updater Service.

I may just get the Linksys tech support people on the phone and see what they say. I’ll post back when and if I discover what the problem is.

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I wanted to bring this one to a close just in case someone else ever encountered a similar situation. I called Linksys Tech support and they told me to just type in the password when the dialog appeared. I told them the dialog box was appearing every few minutes… They were no help at all! And, to set the record straight, I made a mistake in my original post – I had stated that the dialog appeared regardless of which browser I was using, when it fact, the problem only occurred with Firefox.

Yes, it had nothing to do with CCleaner or Google Earth (Updater). It ended up being an issue with a Firefox AddOn. “Router Status 0.1.7.8”. I had been using this for quite a while without the dialog popping up all the time. I’m not sure why it’s behavior changed – but it may have had something to do with Firefox upgrades??? I disabled the addon, and the problem has stopped.

And lastly, (although not necessary to fix this issue) I changed the default password for my router. I still felt this needed to be done after reading through the resources that was linked from Stuart’s posting. Thanks again for the heads up. This could have been a bigger mess than it was.

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Thank you for sharing this solution as I also have a Linksys router (wireless) and use FF as well. I now know what to be aware of.

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Nice bit of diagnosis / debugging!

It’s easy to forget that disabling browser add-ons, and then re-enabling them one at a time, can be very effective when nothing obvious is causing problems.

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