OK, a little history. The computer is a Toshiba laptop running Vista. I hate the computer and Vista but the price was right. A friend who is heavily into ham radio using Morse code bought it to use in things like contest logging but found that it was not suited to the task so he replaced it and gave this one to me. It already had Vista loaded and a lot of other applications so I use it as supplied. Changing to another one is definitely on the to do list but right now I use it on the net and do everything else on another one to keep malware and government snoops out of my affairs.
The Ask invasion is not very old, just enough to make me want to get rid of it. Sometimes I can do a search with Google and it stays in Google, sometimes the first page comes up in Google and sometimes it goes straight to Ask. I checked out the various fixes and found Ask in the search list as Ox said. As soon as I am fairly sure I have the procedure right, I should be able to delete it.
Thanks for all the help.
Bill