I'm going to agree with Scott and say that your best bet is reinstalling. There was a recent article in the Wahington Post about a tech who spent 8+ hours cleaning up an infected machine and never quite got it right. Unless you've got oodles of free time on your hands, reinstall and get yourself a good Firewall and A/V software before you ever connect to the internet. On average, it takes less than 30 mins for an unpatched machine sitting on the Internet to get infected.

I have Adware at work, and Spybot at home. I had no choice in the Adware at work--network administrator's idea. The IT people for my cable internet highly recommened Spybot, and CNET gives it good reviews. So far, Spybot has been a better experience for me than Adware. Spybot seems to work much faster than Adware, and doesn't tie up/slow down my computer as much when it's running, and it snags updates much faster than Adware as well.

Last time I had a machine with over 400+ reported instances of spyware it took me 4 hours of non-stop work to clean. The machine was too important to reformat so the owner insisted I just clean it... Major task

I had a bad spyware problem and gave up and reinstalled Windows. No problems after that. Its time consuming but at least its a fresh start.

One of the major changes I made was dumping Internet Explorer as my main browser and going with Mozilla's Firefox. All the nasty programs and bugs on the Web attack IE and so best not to use it and avoid the traps.

I had a nasty bug last year, I think it came over and activex controll. Regardless, it kept poping up as a service, and wrecking havoc. I would stop the service and delelte the file but no avail. Everytime I rebooted it was back there.

once I figured out it was resident in the memory, very nasty, I turned back to an old standbye. Norton. Now, I never really use norton today, use AVG and Panda for AV mostly. Plus Ad Aware. I don't use Spybot S&D anymore, since the latest version loaded something on my system too, which I didn't like.

But, to get rid of the memory resident I had to do a reboot and boot to the Norton CD. It then was able to purge the memory resident bug and that cleared up all the problems.

If you have something in memory, which is loading at boot, then nothing is going to clean it once the system is up and running.

Kept me from having to reinstall, which would have been costly from a time perspective. Too many financial and corporate apps to reload and configure.

Man, I gotta get better with backups.

good luck

when you finally get rid of it (I spent MONTHS getting rid of it on the computer my son uses)--get rid of Internet Explorer and use Mozilla Firefox for your browser.

You guys are full of good news

Thanks for all the good advice

Spybot is excellent. So excellent in fact, it would be worth a handsome amount of money!

PestPatrol is also a very good program to combat spyware and adware.

I�ve flirted with a small sideline business helping people clean this stuff off their machines, I�ve raised my hourly rates and there�s no end in sight. I think I can make more $$ doing this than from my full time job, and no travel, either!

The detect and remove programs out there do quite a good job. And none of the better ones require you to manually edit the registry. But, you have to invest time initially to use and understand them (or pay someone to install and explain them to you), and then later you must keep them up to date and also run scans frequently (this you can do yourself).

The current thinking is to use a layered approach (firewall, AV, malware prevention, malware detection/removal) to prevent malware from getting in your PC. In the detection and removal layer, using just one detect and remove program is not sufficient, you need to use three or four to completely detect and clean everything. If you have any doubts about this, the stories abound, for example today�s USA Today is typical.

It sounds like your immediate need is to detect and remove. So, here�s my opinion on some of the preceding suggestions, and some others not yet mentioned:

SpyBot is not what it used to be a few months ago, the others have gained ground on it, but it�s still one of the better free ones out there.

AdAware (make sure you get the new AdAware SE Personal Edition, it's greatly improved above previous versions) is very, very good.

TDS-3, stands for Total Defense Suite 3, you download a 30 day trial copy from http://www.diamondcs.com.au/ - As with all the others, get the latest definition updates, TDS-3 calls them �radius files�. This is considered the gold standard in malware detection and removal. If you were a corporate IT department faced with cleaning up a huge number of your employees PCs, you'd pay a license fee and use this. It works just as well for one person as for a large corporation, so download it, update the definitions and run it first before you run anything else.

"Spy Sweeper" from www.webroot.com is also top of the line. Note that there is a similarly named trojan out there, SpySweeper, (no space in the name). FYI, there�s a whole class of false malware removers out there, sometimes called �Rogue Spyware Removers� -- they claim to clean up this scumware, but they really introduce more without cleaning up anything -- �SpySweeper� is one of these, �Spy Sweeper� from WebRoot is not.

The preceeding two tools are *not* free, but you can download trial versions good for 30 days. In my opinion, there are the only two detect and remove apps worth paying for, and if you buy just one, get Spy Sweeper, it sells for $25-$30. Spy Sweeper also has some prevention features in it, for example, it will tell you when something maliciously is added to your browser�s favorites, or when a new program in setup to run the next time you boot your PC (a common way to insert and persist malware).

One more worth noting, �HijackThis.exe� is a somewhat specialized tool, it�s free, but you need to interpret the logs it produces. This is one of the best ways to clean up CWS (CoolWebSearch) in all it�s variations (although CWS is the one malware that continually evades cleanup). The people who wrote HijackThis constantly tweak it to discover the latest twist on CWS.

The simplest advice, if you�re up to it, is to start with TDS-3, and run it until it comes up absolutely pristine, or you can explain what each and every exception is. Then do the same with AdAware, and then SpySweeper, and then SpyBot. This would be the long hours previous posters have mentioned.

One more I want to mention, SpywareBlaster. It�s purely prevention, no detection or removal whatsoever, but it�s great at what it does. And it doesn�t need to be running to work (It simply writes values to the registry that IE and Mozilla use to add additional protection when visiting certain malicious web sites known to cause problems). It�s free, get it and update it regularly. SpywareBlaster, and using a browser other than IE, such as Mozilla or FF, could easily prevent a large majority of the malware infections going on out there.

The simple solution is to NOT use IE ever again.

I made the switch to Firefox/Thunderbird and have not had anything (I still scan just in case).

I have a friend who got the nasty Hot Kiss Porn dialler that made about $100 worth of phone calls (drops the connection and calls a premium rate number). Installed Mozilla (they have Win 95!) and they're fine now too.

So to the OP:

Reformat
Reinstall Windows/Applicatoins
Install and use Firefox/Thunderbird

This is exactly the combination I use (along with Norton Internet Security Pro - and I also occasionally sweep with Ad Aware as well). I've been malware (and popup) free with this combination.

Pest Patrol, in my experience, comes up with a lot of false positives.

I agree with using Firefox or Mozilla over IE, but bear in mind that you don't have to use a browser to get a malware/scumware infection. You can simply connect an unprotected PC to a broadband connection, and within X minutes, you're infected. In some reports, X is as low as three minutes.

If you're only using one or two of these apps, I'd expect you have some things that are going undetected. Use three or four of the top ones and you'll be OK.

Is Norton still the resource hog it used to be? I dumped it for McAfee when my machine took forever to boot and ran noticeably slower.