evil adware

Argh! I've been infected! First by the poorly named WinFixer, and now by MatchService.com. I suppose that as infections go, adware is not as bad as viruses, but they are nontheless annoying.

In an effort to battle them, I have installed all sorts of anti-virus programs.

cwshredder (Cool Web Site Shredder)
CCleaner
HijackThis
RegistryFix
SpyBot
SpyWareDoctor

I was a little disappointed that cleaning up my Registry has not improved my computer's performance. Or perhaps the adware is interfering, as my computer's startup time is markedly slower than before. Bah!

At least I got rid of that superfluous Thunderbird 1.02 uninstall listing.

2005/08/28 note:
I also installed:
Lavasoft's Ad-Aware
SpywareBlaster
Winpatrol
IE-SPYAD2
and plan to install:
grisoft's antivirus software (debating about using the firewall too)
bhblaster

Since I don't need RegistryFix, I uninstalled it. Thinking about getting rid of CCleaner too. That still leaves me with a lot of software to battle bad software.

Technically Ad-Aware and SpyBot are redundant, so I could get rid of one. SpywareDoctor is the only software with free realtime support, but I keep getting an error saying that the database is incompatible with my version of Spyware Doctor, so I wonder if it's actually working properly.