[dayglored]

Cleaning up your present system might be hard-to-impossible. And there's no point unless you change how you use it. Let me suggest this:

1. Re-install Windows (XP) and your applications fresh.

2. Get good anti-malware (I use MS Windows Live OneCare and SpyBot Search-and-Destroy, others are also good). Make sure it covers all viruses, worms, trojans, adware, and spyware.

3. Enable all the protections, including the firewall.

4. Don't visit social-networking or porn sites. Don't click on random links in unknown email or web pages.

5. Don't visit social-networking or porn sites. Don't click on random links in unknown email or web pages.

6. Yes, that's an intentional dupe. Remind yourself every time you click.

Or you can save yourself a lot of time and get a Mac, but that's not for everybody. If it were, Mac would have more than the present 10% market share.

I use Macs for my main machines, but I have about four copies of XP running in VMs (virtual machines). They all use the above rules.

[org.whodat]

You left out, In Xp create accounts, never use the administrator account and password on the Internet.