Quote:
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.

for pesky adware, download ad aware and spybot, update the reference files then boot in SAFE MODE. what happens is that these annoying programs have failsafes, checking to see if their Run registry entry is existing. if not, then they recreate it immediately. So, logical thing is to kill the process beforehand? Nope, when their processes are killed, autorestart kicks in. how you ask? they actually have two processes running, one checking the other if they're alive. if not, then launch the missing process. ad aware tries to kill these processes on its own with its memory scan, but can only kill processes one at a time. hence the fact you can't get rid of this version of spyware. Safe mode gives you a clean slate to let you get rid of that thing.

anyway, upgrade to XP SP2 when you can, or use spywareblaster. that'll prevent you from auto-downloading most of these "iexplorer enhancements".