In my mind, I've got them tied to a chair in a soundproof room and

[yvr girl]

I am doing terrible, unspeakable things to them. It would make the 'incident' in Iraq look like Brownie camp.

Who's my victim, you ask. The lovely individuals who unleased spyware and viruses on the world. I'll never get this day back.

[seriousstan]

1. I can help with both of these problems. What are the symptoms?

[yvr girl]

2. My computer just hit a wall today

It very suddenly started working very slowly. I ran Adaware and it came up with about 225 items. (I run this program all the time btw) It quarantined them, but it would hang when it tried to delete them. I ran Spybot and that got rid of tons of items. I did Adaware again, and I got rid of lots more.

I'm down to 12 items (2 families) that it can't delete. I've been restarting my computer and retrying - no joy.

[Gato Moteado]

3. you need to stop surfing so much porn

;)

[yvr girl]

4. I went looking for a music lyric

and all hell broke loose.

[Gato Moteado]

5. which music lyric?

[seriousstan]

7. Download a program called hijackthis.

Run it and it will document all programs running on your startup.

http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html

[yvr girl]

9. Yes, master

I did it, but I can't see anything obvious in the list. It's a long list.

[seriousstan]

12. The really nasty ones usually have a R0 or a R1 in front.

This may not be the problem in your case. Most of the bad ones also change your homepage. I also will run everything I have and then restart my computer in "safe" mode and run them all again. This will usually catch anything that is trying to reload itself.

[StrongbadTehAwesome]

6. my husband feels your pain

he does computer service for a university, and you wouldn't believe the number of professors and staff whose computers get absolutely loaded with this crap. it's not from porn surfing either (well...some of it is); it's mostly from game sites - uproar.com is HORRIBLE for that, or as you said, looking up song lyrics. Cleaning this crap off of computers has become 80% of his entire job.

[bettyellen]

8. mini hijack: what works for macs w/ spyware??

i think i'm having the same problems as yver!
hiya babe, when i first read your post i thought it was hey hey tied to the chair! LOL!

[yvr girl]

10. That was not how I planned to school him

I was going to chat with him, not tie him up.

[bettyellen]

13. well you had mentioned payback for your brothers and they

did tie you up to a pole in the basement, so.... i was just wondering about your evil plan, LOL!

[Schema Thing]

11. They deserve to die slowly, I agree

Someone here posted a few programs to optimize and clean up your computer a couple of weeks ago.

This one: KMCS Deluxe System Suite, has worked nicely for me. It has a varied set of tools, the one that I think might be most helpful to you is the "super-delete"... It kills programs, even ones that are running, on startup after you mark them for deletion.

Also, the disk clean up tool is great for emptying all those Internet temp pages and etc temp files (some of which, on my system anyway, were undeletable by me, and seemed to be malware).

The program is shareware, and they let you use if fully functional for free.