Ars Technica has a very good article up that compares software that hunts down and destroys malware on Windows machines. This comes as the second part of a very good article on what malware is and some general tips on avoiding it. Ars has a good reputation in technical circles. Gee, I wonder why… 
(I think these articles could be linked to in stickies. I hope this thread generates some interest.)
Derleth,
Great articles! I’ll be forwarding the links to other members of our company’s IT staff for future reference.
Good atricle, I’ve been using SpyBot and Ad-Aware as a pair for a while now and AVG antivirus. My kids are constantly getting hit with spyware and malware, it’s seems to me they are targeting the kid game sites.
Derleth, thanks! I’ve bookmarked them and sent them to my other email account so I can find them to show my mom when I go to her house next. She thinks she may be having some malware problems.
Good to know the freebies scored high!
I like doubling up on SpyBot and AdAware, myself, VenusProbe: They always seem to catch two different groups of malware on any system sufficiently infested.
(Interestingly, on a severely infected system I was tasked with restoring once, AdAware would not successfully install until SpyBot had been installed and run. I figure a piece of malware was somehow blocking the AdAware install, but SpyBot was able to remove the offending program and allow AdAware to ferret out another horde of suspicious characters.)
As an aside, and this is mentioned in the second article I link to, it’s good to go with the names you know when choosing anti-malware software. Some malware disguises itself as being a program that will clean out spyware, when in fact it simply infests you further.
Here is another, larger review of anti-spyware software. It includes software I didn’t even know existed.