Hair-pullin'

Adware, spyware, scumware, whatever the hell you call 'em, they all SUCK! Those little bastards infected my computer just like a virus. I've spent the last five days (give or take) trying to exterminate my machine - trying to pry those little buggers out of here. Holy crap - if you have a constant Internet connection, it's almost impossible to get rid of those little creeps.

I'm running Spybot and Ad-Aware (the freeware version) but all that's doing is keeping them from doing serious damage - it's not keeping them off my machine. I'm gone for five minutes, I get at least 20 popup ads at least. It wasn't this bad before, I'm hoping it'll die down after a day or two. Honestly, I thought the situation was much worse. I was getting errors out the ying-yang, problems with Norton AntiVirus, and Windows Installer. All kinds of random seeming crap.

A shout out to hcul b/c he helped me run through a Windows repair the first time things went badly. That one repair didn't fix it but it got me looking around to try and get things back in shape. At any rate, a few more tweakings and now I'm down to merely annoying popup windows, at least the machine's running along fairly nicely now.

Update 12/12/04: I've started using Mozilla as my browser (thanks to a couple of friends who suggested doing so) and it appears that most of the infestation is under control. There still is an occasional flare-up but it's pretty low-key.