So it happened.

My PC got seriously infected, and not with viruses; I'm telling that with much trust to AVG which is guarding my PC 24/7/365.

I heard a lot about how much time it takes people, much more PC-aware than me, to fight those little stingy things on hard drives. Well, it took me one night. One night to clean one single PC with one single HDD after one case of infection.

At least I thought it was just some bad *.exe-file, namely "anti-troj.exe", showing several instances in Windows Task Manager (BTW, I'm running Windows XP with Service Pack 2, as many of you do out there). That "anti-troj.exe" was eating my PC's memory quite voraciously (I've got just 512 MB - a point to laugh about).

So I did a quick research on Google after a string "anti-troj.exe+spyware" and found out it was some worm. Really a worm 'cause it sneaked into Windows folder, System32 folder, and the Registry. It even crated its own folder for downloading files from the Internet! Can you imagine WHAT it was supposed to download onto MY hard drive?

I was about to scare. Having deleted several entries from the Registry, and folders, I rebooted. It didn't help a lot. Task Manager didn't show any instances of the worm this time, but... for several minutes I couldn't make it open. CRTL+SHIFT+Esc didn't work. Neither could I open the Task Manager via Taskbar nor through Command Run windows.

Finally it opened, after a winlog.exe error came up. Another research on Google made me think that it was infected as well.

My first action was to run a well-known Lavasoft Ad-Aware, which I downloaded, installed and updated the Reference file. It took quite some time to scan a 80 GB drive, than Ad-Aware said it found 733 malicious entries and traces. This is where I got shocked and... curious. Yeah, I decided to make my own test to compare some popular anti-spyware products on the market. Having a PC so densely populated with anything I don't like (well, can I hate spyware? Probably), it wasn't a bad idea to carry out some comparison; this would give me some precious knowledge and the chance to choose the best spyware removal tool for the future. I've read several anti-spyware comparison tests, more comprehensive and better laid-out, but as it happens we trust more what we do ourselves. And so do I. Thus I chose four products claiming to destroy all and any spyware inside my PC.

The four are: Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spyware Nuker, WebRoot SpySweeper, and Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta1. (by now Microsoft's spyware killer is in beta stage 2, and has chenged it's name to Windows Defender. It's still free to try, but when Final, it won't be free anymore).

The results with clickable screenshots are available on my blog.