I know of at least five or six people who's Windows computers are gathering dust because they are bogged down in malware and the owners don't want to put any more money into them and are too frustrated to try and fix it themselves.
I spoke to a woman just today who uses Windows XP in her office... who is going to take her Compaq XP computer back to Costco to exchange it for the THIRD time in less than four months so she can start over again and not have to worry about installing all the extra stuff just so she can get email. This last time was when the SBC global tech installed DSL for her... as soon as her computer finished booting, it was covered with pop-up ads. The tech's response was "I don't know how to stop that." and he left.
I gave her a list of what to install... but she is still going to return her computer to Costco and start over. She is not alone. I am sure Costco really appreciates all these returns.... they get a lot of them... of computers with nothing physically wrong with them but infestation with spyware and adware.
I told her to install my list as soon as she got it - before she connected it to the internet - and burned a disk with the SW on it for her.
Educate your friends. There are plenty of free automated tools for dealing with those issues, among which MS offers a superb one (Anti-Spyware Beta). The MS tool locks down the registry and prevents unauthorized changes. So you're complaining about a non-issue.