Thanks Mole and Masken for the replies.

The intent of my post was not to show alternative methods of removal or as Mole asked - ( nothing to do with flat out viruses and worms )

Hopefully all the Admins of this board are quite capable of cleaning up a system one way or another. I was wanting to point out that the tools are not up to the task for a "HOME USER" which most are targeted at and only recently have some started targeting at the IT Professional.

Giving a home user the tip to stop "suspicious" looking processes with Taskmanager is semi futile. Most of the more advanced spyware will just spawn a new process and most home users and many Admins don't know what looks "suspicious" in the first place. I've worked with many other Admins and most are great guys, but knowing what processes should or should not be running was not a strong point for probably more then half of them.


The average home user will typically only run or click what you put right in their face. No searching for options etc...

That said, since some are now starting to target the IT Professional - they're not up to the task either. As briefly mentioned I also at the end used the advanced options and methods to remove the problematic spyware and none of the applications were able to remove them.

Mole, yes I agree that going into SAFE MODE right off the bat is probably the best approach to start cleaning up, however NONE of the products tell you that or offer to walk the user through that type of cleanup. All of them attempt to keep cleaning while using the users rights of a normal logon.

There are some great sites out there with good information for removing stubborn spyware.

Al was somewhat skeptical that I would be able to remove NAIL.EXE from the system so it took me a while to find it, but finally found a site and downloaded it and installed it.
It was not too hard to remove Al

Some of the spyware loaded as system drivers which makes it difficult to remove even in SAFE MODE unless you pay attention.

Hopefully maybe some of the makers of these programs will continue to make their programs better for the average user.

If you do want more information on Spyware this site seems to have some of the best information on the subject that I could find.

Spyware Warrior - Waging the war against spyware

They have a very active forum on the subject and a lot of good links and other information on the subject. This would be good for an "above average" home user, but the typical home user wouldn't know or even want to spend the time reading this, if they even could. A typical heavily infected system often can't get to a specific site anyways and is frustrated just trying to run the other applications while these darn popups keep happening without them even launching IE on their own.

As a note often brought up by Microsoft and others which is true. If the user has the latest service pack and all critical updates applied and is running a current and updated antivirus solution then the spyware infestation possibilities are greatly reduced. Running as a limited user really helps even more.
 

Maybe the http://spywarewarrior.com/ people will read this posting as well as some of the makers of these Spyware Removal tools.