I have spent the last few hours trying to clean up a friend’s computer from a lot of spyware, adware, a couple of trojans and a couple of dialers. It is an absolute mess to say the least. We started early this evening and an AV scan is still going. I am trying to see how much can be cleaned up with the antivirus before moving onto removing the EliteToolbar (using this tool from SimplyTech).

The antivirus that was installed expired a long time so the AV definitions were too old to provide any significant protection. The machine was also running XP without Service Pack 2, which tells you more about the state of the PC itself. I wonder how many average family windows machines are in this state, letting spyware take over? I guess it is some what appropriate that we are doing this during Halloween, I should’ve asked for treats and not this trick :o)

update: A few hours since we got started, I was able to remote the EliteToolbar, remove a few trojans and one dialer that were installed on the machine. I have installed Firefox and AVG free edition as the web browser and antivirus solutions. I am also installing Service Pack 2, the rest of the windows patches and I will configure the machine to download and install any new MS patches released in the future. I hope this is enough to avoid re-imaging the machine and start all over from scratch.