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I do relate strongly with the situation, I picked up a very NASTY spyware program off this website, the program was called SPYAXE. NASTY NASTY little program. Ended up doing full system recovery to get rid of it, there was no way I was paying them $20.00 to remove a program that it it put on my machine. Becareful of the links you click around here.
use Microsoft Antispyware, boot your computer in safe mode and use it though. thats the key
arctic, I had SPYAXE too. I just searched it up on google and found a way to get rid of it
Starting computer and doing the scan in safe mode very good idea. It is also a good idea to scan the antivirus in safe mode also once in a while. You will have to manualy start the virus or spyware program and once done just restart computer and will start up normaly. Ther are certain viruses and spyware that hide in the windows program when you start up.
I would suggest those free programs also clearing out your temporary files update anti virus definitions, use firefox etc. But really your system is going to be extreamly vunrable until next tusday the 10th because of the WMF vunrability. read more http://www.f-secure.com/zero-day. I installed the unofficial patch that you can get at http://www.grc.com/default.htm.
But here is a good thread on general computer managment http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.ph...ic=289948&st=0
also in some cases when the computer is completly hosed I would suggest a reformat and reinstall of the Operating System, mostly for your own sanity and also some really nasty things can get installed onto your computer (rootkits, keyloggers etc.). In the case of rootkits a reinstall is the only way your going to be able to be sure that it was is removed. I would suggest using a program called RootkitRevealer from http://sysinternals.com. And I personally don't run windows xp with admin privledges, none of the software I use on a daily basis requires admin privledges and for the things that do the RunAs command works pretty good.