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Which brings up the question: Have you tried Ad-Aware and/or Spybot on your friend's computer? That's specifically what they're made to do: Remove that kind of stuff

Of course! I installed Ad-Aware and Spybot, the latest versions, latest reference files, and they installed that Pest Patrol program. They did find the components of the particular spyware program, and removed them. However, none of them could remove this registry key, though they all found it. Ad-Aware, disturbingly, did not give any sort of alert to let the user know it could not remove it. In fact, I think it may have been unaware that it couldn't, as it was listed in the quarantined files, but after deleting the quarantine, the key was still there.

What's worse is that even after removing other components of the program, after a restart you'll get them right back again. What's the difference between this and a virus again? I'd like someone to explain that to me. These companies suck.

By the way, have any of you downloaded the latest Ad-Aware (the SE version)? I wasn't aware it was such a change over version 6. I had 6 installed on this machine I was working on, and it found about 130 objects. THEN I installed SE, and that found over 200 afterwards. Pretty good. I wasn't aware that the new version was available, as the last time they "urged" users to upgrade, reference files stopped becoming available for the version I was using.