I think I may have finally shifted the spyware infection that has plagued my PC for the last few days. I've been battling an infection of Vundo which is apparently notoriously difficult to remove as it copies itself into the registry, and produces more copies of itself if it thinks it's been deleted. The whole point of it is to produce popups and redirect traffic, but it also has the side effect of bringing your PC to a screeching halt.

I thought I had it beat when I used Spybot Teatimer to freeze the registry while I scanned for and manually removed all of the registry entries and files, but a lot of programs don't pick up the entire infection so it came back with a vengeance and started freezing my web browsers (which is now causing me some stress since every time my browser pauses for a second or stops loading pages for a second or my PC stops responding for a second I have a heart attack). Installing SP3 is the only thing that managed to fix the browser freezing, even after Vundo was gone, and so far there's been no freezing so it's all good.

Anyway, the nice folks over at the Major Geeks forums helped me remove it. They analyze logs and provide detailed instructions on removing anything that gets past their generic cleaning process, so if you're having spyware troubles I recommend them.