Spyware

Thanks to everyone who commented and came up with some great suggestions and anti-spyware software to use. After a night of wrestling with my system I will tell you what I found.

Spybot and Adaware are both very good free programs but they have a tendency to miss or be tricked by some of the more aggressive scumware on a system. I use Internet Explorer for about 1% of my browsing(to see how a webpage will look like if someone is using IE or sometimes there is an issue with Mozilla and it is just easier to use IE, etc) and it turns out that I think I just won't bother opening IE again. I wish I could just delete it from my system altogether to be honest.

I ended up chasing down all the threads that were running, googling them to find out what the hell they were (Win2K has a ton of system processes that it runs in the background), deleting them, checking the registry and so on. I don't know what kind of spyware I had but it basically just took control of my system and started adding every type of Adware program you could think of. Weatherbug, CoolSearch, popups, etc. I got most of it off but there are some more persistent ones that keep opening IE threads in the background which I am going to have to chase down.

The thing that annoys me about this most of all is that I have a tech background so I can usually chase down a problem like this but what about the more casual users who don't know that their system has been hijacked?