Long story short...
I did my weekly scan with Hitman Pro Free. It came up with a half dozen tracking cookies and and 612 malware remnants (that it searches for at the end of the scan) Most of these had the word "Applian" or variations on the spelling. A couple more attempts and this number went down to 30.
Now I have had these FLV video clips on this computer for a long time now, and HM Pro never had a problem with them before. Wanting to get the problem fixed, emotion took over from logic and I ran AdwCleaner. It found 5 registry items which I proceeded to delete. Bad idea. The clips are still there and play with RealPlayer. So I apparently removed some important files FLV Player needed to work
A System Restore came next, but it didn't work for some reason, so I undid it. At this point, I went to take a nice brisk walk in the warm sunshine that has been scarce around here. There is no sign of Applian FLV Player in Programs and Features, so somewhere in this misguided adventure the program got deleted, although the shortcut remains on the Desktop.
Would a reinstall solve this problem? I assume the FLV program would download all the files it needs and delete those it doesn't. As always, thanks for your help and advice,