Installer thinks there's an installation in progress on OS X

Question

Every time I log off on my user account, an Installer prompt comes up asking

"Are you sure you want to abort the installation?"

and the options are Abort or Cancel. I am absolutely certain that I currently have nothing installing, I have had this problem since January and it's now becoming an annoyance. If memory serves me right I successfully installed a 3rd party app not sure which with no problems (I think it was Wireshark or VirtualBox) and the prompt came up ever since.

I have tried using the task manager and force quitting the installer process but it just popped up again after a minute. any ideas how to fix this?

My specs (If relevant):

• iMac 21.5' Late 2013 2.7Ghz Quad Core i5 8Gb DDR Ram
• Mavericks 10.9.5
• 5 Months old (Christmas gift)
• Many 3rd Party Applications
• Never backed up, I don't have an external drive

Answer 1

You've got a bit of [spy|mal]ware running. Check the following locations:

• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
• ~/Library/LaunchDaemons/
• /Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/
• /System/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/

Look for things that are out of the ordinary. Google anything you don't recognize. When you find something you don't trust, launchctl unload -w it, then view the plist and file the files that it's executing. Delete them*. When you think you've finished cleaning up, reboot.

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* Be careful not to destroy your system like this.