About Spybot - READ!
 

For those of you not using Spybot or the ones using it and not having the teatimer activated:

I've been reading a lot about spyware here today, so I thought I'd give you a little tip, that will not avoid it all, but will help like hell:

Get spybot (http://www.spybot.com) and in the advanced features, activate TeaTimer... Everytime a page tries to change your homepage, or try to install something on your PC, it will ask you for "permission".

Best tool I've found so far. It's worth it!
As I said, somethings will escape it, it is not infalible, but it helps a LOT!

Check out www.ad-aware.com too :)

or better........... use Linux ;-)

One word.. Linux

I use Spyware blaster and it kicks ass.

I discovered this Teatimer feature yesterday, and it's prompted me a million times everytime a spyware program requests to make a registry change. It's a great little tool.

Thank god I've actually gotten every last bit of spyware off my machine. I still have one browser component from one that creates an ad window on the left hand side Google AdWords style... trying to figure out how to get rid of that fucker, but the rest of my machine runs fine.