I can hardly believe with all this good advice that nobody mentioned the most powerful, most overlooked clean-up program available...



It's called Add/Remove programs...guaranteed to remove 80% of what ails ya.

I have been fighting it for literally years.
I don't think following a checklist really counts, but whatever... about the only thing I can agree with is your link to help2go. As much as I hate automated scans, many of the 'consultants' on that site are well known, and work hard to keep it updated. That doesn't mean, however, that it isn't prone to false positives.

Along with any good help guide should be a list of places to research problems. CastleCops has some of the best:
http://computercops.biz/CLSID.html
http://computercops.biz/LSPs.html
http://computercops.biz/StartupList.html

In Addition:
http://www.liutilities.com/products/...rocesslibrary/

Also, how about some real tools for when you have malware that automated processes don't touch? These are what the real experts use:
http://www.subratam.org/?page=removal
http://www.sysinternals.com/

How about a list of places to turn to when you get in over your head:
http://asap.maddoktor2.com/ -- list on left side