When shutting down the PC, I use C Cleaner to clean the registry and MRU Blaster to clean the cookies that try to hang on. Once a week I’ll use Gary Utilities and Malwearbytes. I have AVG Free running as my virus protection, it scans the whole computer every night. My email opens in the blink of an eye and FireFox comes up in maybe two or three seconds.
I have deleted all the automatic opening websites that come on if the pc is running from Internet Explorer. Adblock Plus and NoScript are my two downloads for FF. My firewalls are locked down tight. I don’t use ActiveX, Chrome or any of the fancy software except on websites that I fully trust. That seems to be where most of today’s problem originate.
Check out Spywareblaster. I have used it for years.
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/spywareblaster.html