dial-up connection popup keeps coming back after disconnecting from internet

I'm working on someone else's computer (Win98SE). I installed Firefox on it a couple of days ago, and I've noticed that every time I log off the internet, the dial-up popup screen comes up 2-3 more times, asking me if I want to connect to the internet. It's the same screen that comes up when I double click on the Firefox icon on the desktop.
The owners have always used IE in the past, and the computer was configured to dial-up the internet whenever the IE icon was double-clicked. I didn't intentionally set up Firefox to do the same, but apparently it's done just that. The settings default was to "always dial a connection "; I tried changing it to "dial when a connection is not present ", but that doesn't seem to have affected the situation.
It's obviously not anything critical, but it IS kind of annoying. Any idea what's causing this?
Thanks,
Rebecca
PS - the owners report the same "problem" with the connection popup after disconnecting from the internet when they used IE

 

Obviously something is trying to connect and that "something" is usually spyware.

If you haven't already, download, install, immediately update and then run Spybot and/or Ad-Aware. I recommend you use them both since each tends to find things the other misses. Let them clean up any spyware found and see if that eliminates the problem.

If the computer has a load of spyware, you might want to download and install Spyware Blaster. It keeps spyware from getting on the machine in the first place. The free version must be updated manually but other than that, it's fully functional.

 

I'm no longer at that particular computer to keep working on the issue, but I'm still curious. While I was there, I installed (and updated) Ad-Aware, Spybot, Spywareblaster and Spyware Guard. Ad-Aware came up with 175 critical bugs, which were all successfully removed; Spybot found about a dozen, which were all successfully "fixed" except for a single DSO exploit. The dial-up connection popup, though, persisted even after that.
Hmm, thinking back... I know I ran Spybot a couple of times after the initial "cleaning ", but I'm not sure about Ad-Aware. Maybe something that I checked to be fixed on Ad-Aware didn't really get deleted. I'll try running it again the next time I'm visiting, and possibly try posting a Hijack This log. As long as the computer isn't actually dialing up the internet on its own, I know the owners aren't going to care enough to follow up on their own (it's an elderly couple who insist they "can't do that kind of stuff ").
Thanks for the reply, Miz!

 

Download any updates to those programs and then run them in safe mode. Also, try selecting never dial a connection.

 

rebecca,

Just set the browser to work offline ( in File menu).