It is mainly on boot-up that I have the issue. When I go into the system diagnostics, there are logs that indicate occasional system “shell degradation” and other warnings that note my boot up is slow (duh).
Running AdAware right now to see if anything got missed in the earlier Malware scan.
Adaware has not found as much stuff in the past for me as other programs have. I do usually download it as an extra scanner when at a friend’s home.
Overall success rate in the past for currently free spyware scanners:
1. Spyware Doctor
2. Spybot Search and Destroy
3. Malwarebytes.org (this got rid of a rootkit a month ago that nothing else could touch, but I’ve had similar successes with Spyware Doctor over the years)
4. Adaware (basically everything its found is what Spybot found, but this found less)
Spyware Doctor is only made free as part of the Google Pack of free software. Unlike SpySweeper, it doesn’t need boxes checked to find all the bad stuff (if you are running a scanner to get rid of problem, why would you not want to search for some?). Strangely, ESET and Avira antiviruss both have extra settings you need to check for deeper sensitivity. This is basically done to keep false positives to a minimum (so you aren’t accidentally told to remove Microsoft Office or such, but in practice, this class of software has a very low occurrence of false positives—just check prior to removal that it isn’t something you need).
Be sure to use each of the above items and get back to me with your results.