The plural of "anecdote" is not "facts".
Besides, Microsoft disagrees with you.
You can’t clean a compromised system by removing the back doors. You can never guarantee that you found all the back doors the attacker put in. The fact that you can’t find any more may only mean you don’t know where to look, or that the system is so compromised that what you are seeing is not actually what is there.
The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild. That’s right. If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).
Depending on what you mean by compromised, I could agree. But all the machines I have any control over have up-to-date anti-virus, anti-spyware, and the latest patches. The internet is accessed through a hardware firewall with all incoming ports blocked.
The cases where I had to reinstall were not successfully infected. Basically the duel between the protective software and the attempt to install malware resulted in an unbootable machine.