Well my format/reload is done and my system is fine now. I dont get that window popping up at all anymore and my system comes up as clean with all my scans. So clearly whatever was causing that pop up window was buried deep in my system somewhere. So before formatting and reloading I ran darik’s boot and nuke to completely wipe my drive. My format/reload was initially problematic though due to the fact that windows update for xp sp3 now seems to have issues for most people still running it. Apparently since microsoft is discontinuing support for it completely in less than a month there is no fix for it. But even though I couldnt update via windows update, my automatic updates running in the background for a couple days did manage to download all the current updates for it.

Even though my system is clean and running fine now, I will still be upgrading to windows 7 soon.