I recently (yesterday) dealt with the worst spyware infestation I've ever seen. I visited my uncle's place and he asked me to take a look at his computer, which had major IE problems. I booted it up and took a look at the infestation and it was horrible. Here was a computer with no firewall, XP with no Service Pack, and no antivirus. IE was totally unusable and nothing could be downloaded from the net. My first reaction was to format and do a complete reinstall. But my uncle didn't have a CD for XP. So, I had to fix everything by hand.
Luckily, last time I was there, I had downloaded HijackThis! and Spybot S&D. So, I ran HijackThis!. It came up with a bunch of BHO's but the moment I removed them, they were back. Spybot spotted a few things and removed them. The combined efforts of Spybot and HJT were enough to fix IE enough to allow me to download Firefox. This computer literally had layers of spyware!! I remove one hijacker, only to find another one below it!
After this, I managed to download CWShredder, Adaware and AVG. After about 6 hours, the whole computer was as clean as automated tools can get it. After that, all that remained was to tie up some loose ends (System Restore, some leftover executables).
After that, I turned on XP's firewall and taught my uncle how to use Firefox, even downloading an IE skin for it (bleargh!). I turned on the resident guard for everything and left hoping that he won't do it all over again.
All in all, there were about 160 odd individual pieces of spyware on that computer.
So, anyone else seen computers infected as badly as this?
Cheers,
cgkanchi