I've spent the better part of 8 hours trying to remove all the spyware, adware, and the like off a friend's computer. His daughter somehow loaded the computer with so much spyware, before I got to it the windows Start button wouldn't even work. To even interact with windows at all, I had to load the task manager and kill a bunch of processes I didn't recognize. I was able to find at least three spybots, several ads and several viruses. The worst was one called Zesty Find, which is a hijacking program. I would type in www.foxnews.com or any url and every 2nd to third time my browser would be hijacked and either open up 5 windows or close all my browsers. It was horrible. Luckily I found this site...
Computer Cops
I didn't actually need to do this myself, but they have a forum. If you run this program...
hijackthis
You can post the log and they help you clean up your system. I still may have to do this on my friend's computer, but as of now he's fine again.
Good luck...
This is worthy of a bump and a keeper.
For an added measure of protection, do a Google for a program called CW Shredder. Works great at deleting browser hijackers.