I recently go some spyware through Google’s Chrome browser. I had disabled AVG 9 in hopes of getting Mass Effect to run longer than 30 minutes without crashing (to no avail).

Anyway, I was doing something on the internet somewhere and I saw the evil AntiVirus2009 window pop up and the icon in my system tray. I knew the next few hours would be packed with fun!

The key, I found, was to completely clear all of the cookies from all of my browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer, MineField, Opera, Chrome, Chromium, and Iron). This fixed the link redirection issue.

Here are the free projects that let me eventually remove all the crap from Windows XP:
1.) Ultimate Boot CD. I loaded it and ran EZ PC Fix to clear my temp files and recycler. http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm
2.) Malware Bytes: http://www.malwarebytes.org/
3.) SpyBot SD: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
4.) AutoRuns: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
5.) Hijack This: http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/
6.) LSPFix: http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm
7.) WinSockXP fix: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winsockxpfix.html
8.) Fixwareout: Source unknown, can be found at http://ip2k.com/tools
9.) Dial-A-Fix: http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Dial-a-fix
10.) Windows Installer CleanUp Utility (to remove broken MSI packages): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

I have the hard-to-find stuff mirrored here ( http://ip2k.com/tools ) so it never gets lost