Some people earn money by running spyware removal software. They must tout Windows in order to continue in their useless occupation. I think a couple of them are on this thread.
Well, considering i just made $750 cleaning up and immunizing five computers that were heavily infested with spyware for a new client, I might be one of those... Except I suggested that if he REALLY wanted to never have this happen again, he should consider switching to Macintosh.
One of his computers required forty minutes after boot up before it could be used. Near as I could tell two different hijackers were fighting over the home page... it kept changing... back and forth. The damn thing had 37 distinct spyware packages ... 467 spyware files, cookies, registry entries. 128 Ad ware components.... and seven trojans. The worst was two different installations of Cool Web Search. MS Anti-spyware wouldn't even run. I booted it into safe mode and there were 13 of those spyware programs running in Safe mode! Something was preventing the installation of any of the effective anti-spyware apps. I went dumpster diving and started eliminating things by hand in the Registry. I got it so I could boot into safe mode with nothing running and then installed and ran Spybot Search and Destroy (MS AS would still not install). after that ran and did its thing MS anti-spyware finally would install... and it found even more. BOTH however, left two different installations Cool Web Search which immediately started re-installing themselves when the system was booted back into normal mode. That's when I learned that it was Cool Web Search that was arguing, one installation with the other installation, about which got to hijack the home page. Microsoft Anti-spy was popping warnings about attempted changes to the home page every second or two. CWShredder got all but one of two files of that... and Ad-Aware got the final pieces. AVG got the trojans... but their Norton had been totally ineffectual in preventing all this.
The better way would have been to wipe and restore... but there was data all over that HD that they needed... and no coherent organization to make backing up easy.
None of their other computers were anywhere as badly infected as this one was.
I turned their hardware firewall on.