You might try this:

http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_...ry_cleaner.htm

It will clean any orphan rubbish from the Registry, and it automatically makes a backup.

Talking of backups, don't forget to clear out your restore points and manually create a new one

AV products are generally not very good at detecting this sort of annoyance, as it technically isn't malware, and as Cider has mentioned, it usually requires some sort of user participation to load.

I personally use (amongst others):

1. Spybot S & D
2. A-Squared
3. Malwarebytes (includes RogueRemover)
4. Ad-Aware

Spybot and Ad-Aware have resident protection capabilities as well.