I was having the same problem only it was my wife not a friend that loaded my computer up with that crap! I thought about just locking her out of the "puter" but realized the negative effect that would have on my sex life, so after running spybot AND adaware, my system was still real slow. I went to the microsoft update page and ran across Microsoft anti-spyware beta 1 it found literally dozens of things that the others did'nt.
Spirit