essexboy…thank you so much for your help with my computer problem; I am so grateful there are still people like you (few and far between) who take pride in what they do.
I have performed all the cleanup tasks. OTL was not able to remove all the restore points, but I failed to write down the error code, and the report was removed.
I know exactly what caused this recent problem…I was using Goggle Chrome and clicked on a pop-up window that fooled me into believing my browser was out of date…hense big problems. However, I know there were other issues with this computer, and I think those have been fixed as well, so a BIG thank you.
This morning I deleted my backups on this computer and have created a fresh backup, cleaned up everything per your instructions, and will be implementing your recommendations (BIG thank you, again) and the other recommendations from the link, within the next couple of days.
In light of my increasing paranoia about hackers and virus/malware intrusions, I’ve decided to set up separate computers for different types of computer tasks. In other words, I will only do online financial work on 1 computer, online games (Java intensive) on another computer, and email/surfing the web on a 3rd computer, with each one having a separate backup disk, and will reformat usb data travelers much more frequently. This will be more inconvenient, and make maintenance more complicated, but will hopefully be more secure. The upside of keeping tasks separate, is the ability to reformat periodically with less effort and quicker, and should I have a hard disk failure (which happened last month), I will not be so stressed out about loosing everything. LOL Hopefully all 3 will not die at the same time.