Keith, sorry you are still engaged in combat with the evil Softonic. If you do a clean installation of the OS, that would kill the Softonic demon. However, that would also erase all of your personal data on the machine (documents, pictures, whatever you have created) and you would need to reinstall your software that you may have added as well. In other words, it would be like going back to the day it came from the factory.
Restoring from Time Machine or the clone is definitely a possibility, even more so if they were created BEFORE the softonic attack. But if they were created after the attack, the backups may well have the same nasty software as you are seeing now.
So, in order to help with the decision, a quick set of questions:
1. Do you have anything you don't want to lose that you created or added to your iMac?
2. Do you have any software that you installed that you want to keep?
3. Would you be ok if the iMac was back to as it came from the factory?
To be honest, if you aren't comfortable doing what we suggested in the earlier posts in this thread the whole reinstall/restore process may well be beyond your skill level.
How about this: Get Etrecheck (
EtreCheck ) and install it, then run it to get the report. Save the report, then copy the entire thing and paste it into a post here so we can read it. We'll see if we can find where Softonic is getting started so we can kill it for you without the reinstall.
Etrecheck is pretty good and not difficult to run. Just go to the website I gave the link for, download it and you will find a .zip file in your Downloads folder. Double click on the zip file and it will extract the application into your Downloads folder. You don't need to do more, you can then run the software directly from there. You may get a warning that it came from a source that Apple is unaware of, but you can just open it anyway as it is perfectly safe. Pick a reason for the scan (it doesn't matter, pick anything) and the box to execute the software will activate. It will scan everything on your system and eventually show the report. In the left column, scroll to the bottom and there will be an icon labelled "Report" that has the data we need. Click on the report icon. On the top bar of the Etrecheck window will be a "Share report" button. Click it and then "Copy Report" (you may get a note about saving it and other stuff). Now come back to this website, open up a reply and press CMD-V to paste the entire report into the replay.
A few steps there, but nothing terribly difficult. What you are doing is running the report, then the Copy will put it on your clipboard and then you will paste it from there to a post here with the CMD-V keyboard shortcut. Easy, just follow the steps.