well at one point in time we all went through the unwelcomed experience of removing spyware from our computers...
usually i use SpyBot or Spy Sweeper. But i got a nasty bug neither of them would remove. The pesky bug is called SearchAssistant and it's a toolbar that gets stuck in IE. So i serached the net and found that there is one little program that can get get rid of it. It's called HijackThis.exe. It's a bit hard to use it as when its ran it gives back some sort of listwith stuff you can delete. The only problem is there are system files there too. So accidently i also removed Java Virtual Machine and the pesky Search Assistant. My point is: folks be careful when using this program. It's a great removal kit but you need to know what you're removing :)
I reinstalled JVM so now it's ok, but had i deleted anything else the recovery may not be so simple.
hope it helps anyone...