check out my tale of woe on Post 14 & take some advice...don't even try to fix it yourself. I spent something like 20 hours running scan & fix-it programs of every stripe. Very cleverly, there's some sort of code that will eventually try to protect the offender by disabling your ability to remove programs or access your registry to delete bogus entries.
I have printed out all your info and will let my son go through it all. I really appreciate this whole posting and each one of your inputs. :)
Boot into Safe Mode and then run your anti-spyware tools.
Booting into Safe Mode only loads necessary processes. You can't remove some spyware while their malicious processes are running. And, you can't kill the processes.