About 3 years ago, someone my wife (well at that time, just my fiancee) worked with at Sam’s Club got a steal of a deal on a computer that was a display model (or someone returned because Sam’s would take back anything… but that is another story). I was attempting to work on her old computer (Dell Optiplex w/ Pentium II) which ended up having a bad hard drive, when she found this mini HP desktop system. I actually thought it was pretty cool myself. I made some backup install discs (from the wonderful restore partition that HP has) since it had come with no discs or documentation, did a factory restore, and cleaned off the usual crap that comes on new PCs. I even went so far as to install Avast! antivirus (free), Ad-aware (free), and Spybot S&D (free), and Firefox (of course, free), and left a note on the desktop explaining that these utilities were FREE, and how to use them.
Well, it appears to all be in vain, as I got the machine back recently, virus- and spyware-ridden, no spybot, no adware, no avast, not even Firefox (there was evidence that they were once installed though…). Great. On top of this, it appears that many of those so-called anti-spyware applications that are actually full of spyware themselves had been installed, along with a cheap paid-for antivirus application that didn’t seem to be doing much good at all other than block any essential processes from running (as they were infected). Ah, the joys of Windows.
Now, there was a time when, even I thought I was too good to run an antivirus application. I always thought, “that stupid scanner just uses up my precious resources, and I don’t even need virus protection”. Well that all changed when I went to college and hooked up to real broadband internet (plus the local network of trash). I understand that they can be annoying. But, in today’s world you ABSOLUTELY must have a good antivirus application if you have an internet connection. It is just way too easy to get infected. You *might* get away with not having one if you just check your email, but if you care anything about the files on your Windows computer, you will have an antivirus application installed.
So, since I have not had the wonderful experience of having to deal with a machine like this for a long time, I decided to try and recover the current install as best I could. I booted into the machine normally just to scout out the damage. It was so bad, that I am now worried to even use the keyboard on another computer for fear of infecting it. First, I noted that the only Administrator user on the system had a password set, so I booted up a Backtrack Linux CD and used some of the wonderful utilities on there to fix that problem. After that, I booted the installed system into safe mode, and ran ClamWin Portable that caught much of the major infection. At least enough for me to be able to install avast! Antivirus. After running a boot-time scan with avast, I picked up most of what was left over by clamwin. (Needless to say, ClamWin Portable was not all that great… but it nice to be able to have a ready-to-run virus scanner on your thumbdrive, though, something like stinger would probably still do a better job.) Finally, the system is in a semi-usable state. Booting normally this time into Windows, I notice there are a few things that still need cleaned up. After running Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D (as well as cleaning up the Startup List) the machine seems to be in pretty good shape. I also found out that pretty much everything I needed is also available via the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. It may have been easier to do everything from there. I used to use these Win-On-CD discs but they get old quick since you can’t update the data on them… maybe this calls for a USB thumbdrive version 
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