Re: I've been hit - real HARD.
bhai first thing first, a preventive step perhaps. Tighten the security to max on IE. Block/disable everything in the Advance tab.
Install Firefox or Maxthon, make them ur default browser and enjoy the ride. For last 5 months, I have not seen a single spyware or adware or any parasite of likes. I do have full version of Adware, Spybot and Norton Antivirus installed and they are scheduled to update every week. My system flies like a rocket, even though its a six year old PIII 450 Mhz only with 256 DDR RAM on FBS 100 MHz bus. I compare it with my work laptop which is a ginnie P4 3.2 GHz with 1GB RAM. I don't see any big difference at all.
Before August, I was using IE, and had some 430 invisible (not detected by Task Manager or RegAnalyzer) Spyware and leechers, eating the CPU and Memory. My system was like an XT machine. Got frustrated, performed a backup of my own and known data and formated it. Since that day not using IE and living in peace so far.