Go to downloads.com and get AVG. It’s free and effective. As far as spyware, I’m using both “SpyBot - Search and Destroy” and Ad-Aware. Both are free, and I’ll keep using them until I find a good replacement (or two). What’s weird is that both are current with updates and SpyBot has for the last 6 or 7 scans ended with “No threats found,” while Ad-Aware continually finds anywhere from 50 - 100 threats. I don’t know yet whether SpyBot is dropping the ball or Ad-Aware is making all that stuff up.
Are you sure you have you SpyBot Search and Destroy configured to prevent persistant cookies from loading? Betcha almost all those 50-100 issues Ad Aware detects are cookies.