I'm at wit's end, adware took over my machine and nothing works to remove it

I hope someone can give me a pointer to a definitive way to remove adware from this computer. I’m computer savvy but this has me stumped. I installed Spybot, I bought “Spysweeper” by webroot and ran that. I even installed SpywareBlaster which is supposed to block activeX installations and a bunch of other things. I bought McAfee antivirus and ran that as well. These applications all find something during each run through, for example, Spysweeper finds something if I run it twice in a row, makes me believe it removes the offensive item, but when I run it again, the malware is there again! (in this case, something called “ClientMan”, but there are others)

I restart my computer and all this stuff is back worse than ever. What’s more, I keep getting “just in time debugger” messages - and they usually coincide with new popup windows.

The most irritating thing about this whole thing, is that I installed mozilla firefox as my browser, but I still get popup windows in internet explorer even if I never touch it. How is that possible?

I notice some unfamiliar programs in my msconfig startup list, and I tried disabling everything, but here they are back on again when I reboot. How do I completely remove a program from the msconfig startup list and also from “services”? I figure that might help. Then again it might not.

I went to CEXX and another famous site (forgot the name) and tried their procedures. That didn’t help either. I need some systematic advice. Why can’t I get rid of this stuff?

Thanks.

If your running XP , turn off system restore and then do your scans for malware. Delete them ,then reboot. By having the system restore turned on , when its infected ,your just re-infecting yourself everytime you boot.

Once your system is clean , then re engage the system restore.

Declan

try moosofts The Cleaner

Disabling the rollback feature is a must, it also frees up a lot of disk space.

Removal instructions for Clientman

If that doesn’t work, download and run Hijackthis, save the log, and post it here.

Thanks for all the advice. I’ll try those things, if anyone has anything to add, please feel free.

I didn’t see anyone mention Ad-Aware yet. It can catch stuff Spybot misses. Also try CWShredder.