You are not alone.
I am an IT professional and have been so for 20+ years.
I now am cleaning spyware/adware/trojans from computers several times a week.
Most of these machines have become unusable because of it.
The latest genuine threat is Peper. This nasty piece can't be killed until you go into safe mode, delete a pile of hidden files and clean out the registry of BHOs.
I will say this...unless you run a popup stopper and/or an ad remover, you're going to get this garbage.
You need to get and run:
Spywareblaster
spybot search and destroy
Adaware
hijackthis
Further stop using Internet Explorer. Switch over to Mozilla Firefox. At least until this garbage is kept at bay.
Firefox is also VERY extensable. Imagezoomer is a great add-in to firefox. Allows you to zoom in or out any image in any post. There are over 100 add-ins to Firefox that add all sort of nifty things. Firefox displays pages just as fast or faster than IE(if someone tells you otherwise, they have an OS problem, I've installed it on over 50 machines) and Firefox blocks popups and much of the adware issues we've got right now.
-Mal
I've got all the programs you listed except Mozilla. Is it difficult to replace IE with it? How exactly is this done?