I had a spyware program that would drop my fps playing online games down to 4, normally 100 to 120 fps. Imagine how pissed I was when I found that one, I believe it installed with one of the file sharing programs and started causeing problems when I tried disableing it. I since switched to Morpheous (no spyware) for my file sharing needs and scan frequently for spyware, been cool since.

I am a Systems Analyst and do desktop support and it still took a long time to remove it, I can't image what the out of the box computer user would do in this instance. That could cost a lot of money in support and repair charges. I don't know where they get off thinking that our pcs are some kind of public domain for their sales people to run their spy programs to see what we are doing.