They are appearing even as I write this message. When I do something that refreshes the screen, they disappear, but they keep coming. They appear in programs other than my browser. They seem to be trying to say something, but I haven’t gotten enough of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to figure out what. I have collected samples, but I don’t know how to attach them. There is text that says “ate” in one and “soci” or “socl” in another. There is a blue ten below this line and maybe a whole line of tens. I installed avast! pro yesterday just in time for the false positives. I have scanned and found nothing. Last night, I was getting weird disk activity that I could not identify, but I don’t know what that was about. Has anybody else seen this?
I killed all apps and when I restarted them, the images were no longer popping up. Sometime around the time this started happening I visited a web site that was reported as being infected. It had a name that seemed to go on forever. A long time ago, I opened a message on a newsgroup which had some really long fields. My display turned into hieroglyphs. I killed my newsreader and restarted it is and it went away. I suspected that the long fields had overrun some buffer and clobbered something and probably not by accident. Just somebody’s sense of humor. Maybe something like that happened again. Anyway, I haven’t seen any more of the problem since I killed off all the apps.
Welcome to the forums, joliraja. 
We are happy that you have solved your problem and have shared it with us.
You can attach the samples to your next post in this thread by clicking on “Additional Options” to the lower left of the posting box. Please do not click on preview once you use the additional options as this will cause the attachments to not work.
It will be interesting to see your samples. Do you remember the name of the site you visited?
Here they are. It looks like snippets of some sort of logo. These are full size. I cropped to the area where they appeared. In stills, it looks like the ghosts you sometimes get when the edge of something doesn’t get refreshed, but these were just popping up when I wasn’t doing anything. A new one would show up every 30 seconds or so. I don’t think I have ever seen this before and I am not seeing it anymore.
Really? I do this all the time…I have seen older posts mentioning this, but it works when I do that…