Well I glanced through a quick forum about spyware removal and they recommended a certain program called spyware doctor or somthing like that so i went off and DLed it and lo and behold I just downloaded more, you guessed it, crapware not necessarily spyware or malware but more like useless-ware. <sigh> I should have come here first but i didn't and for a second I thought I wasn't going to be able to simply uninstall it but alas It went away.

The primary problem I'm having is that the OS's settings seem to reset every once in awhile somtimes they go back to what they were sometimes they don't. The primary symptom is that the start bar will switch back and forth between XP and classic versions.

If I could get Vista I would just uninstall and start clean but I can't not till mayish. Anyway does anyone have a suggestion as far as spyware/malware removal tools goes? Anything free would also be much apprciated as my car tune up set me back $1500 when it was supposed to be $1150.

Thanks for saving this Kat

AVG AntiSpyware. Spybot Search and Destroy and Webroot Spysweeper, best, better, good for me. I run the first two together.

yeah i got spybot S&D that seems to have found quite a bit of junk on my system there's still some features i'm not sure about but I haven't run into any of the setting glitches I was having yesterday, not yet anyway. My processes list is down by 5 items too. On the downside there is still a bogus SVChost running and two rundll32's but it's impossible to tell which is which via the processes. And it'll be nie impossible to find their locales and determine which is legit.

grim,

quote --"On the downside there is still a bogus SVChost running and two rundll32's but it's impossible to tell which is which via the processes."

I wouldn't be too worried about these items. Various programs can call for the host program to be running, and simply get their name added to the list using the program. In actuallity, only one instance of each of the two program processes you mentioned are likely running no matter how many times you see it listed.

well thats somewhat reassuring. Some sources say that spyware and malware use those titles to camoflage themselves the one SVC host uses like 28,000 K of memory.