man i cant read all these posts cause i'm pretty drunk right now, but listen to me. this is what i do for a living and i'm damn good at it. hijackthis, awsome utility if you know a moderate amount about windows. cwshredder, you dont need to know anything, just run it. adaware and spybot do good and are free. M$ antispyware is starting to impress me and i use it on a regular basis now. start->run->msconfig and go to startup and shut off crap thats not needed at startup, but you do need to know a little about windows for this. you can use add/remove programs and take out some of the spyware this way if you know what to look for. norton utilities is always good to run as well, but not a spyware program. this is what i usually run an it tends to fix most spyware issues, unless i forgot something since i'm a little tipsy but i think i covered most of it. the stuff i said you need to know a little about you can usually post on a forum an they can tell you what to turn off (ie.
http://hijackthis.de ). hope this helps...