ive worked on a hopeless pc before (my family's) and if i had the option i would have reformatted and reinstalled, but my parents said, 'no, we have irriplaceable files on there(ie. a recipe for scallops) fix it!' so had my friend send me AVG free version and MS anti-spyware over aol and i ran those. i started at 5pm and i finished at 1am. i found about 50 viruses with AVG and on MS anti-spyware it found 123 separate types of spyware (this does not include the 3000 registry entries it found). so, in short where theres a will there is a way, but if you have the option to reformat, do it and be done.