I've been working on the laptop of a colleague from work, as he complained that it was almost impossible to use anymore. He described it pretty much like this : "There are tons of windows that open, it's very slow and generally a pain in the ass to work with". It's not the first time I hear descriptions such as that one, and I'm usually not really impressed by the amount of spyware, adware and viruses installed on the machine. Seeing that this was a 4 month old laptop, with all but the most recent windows patches installed, I was impressed.
A first scan with SpyBot returned 286 malware related entries. After uninstalling an expired copy of Norton Antivirus and installing AVG Free, 195 virus related files were discovered. I also uninstalled WinSoftware AntiVirusPro 2006 (adware!) and made sure the OS was patched to the latest level.
A couple of hours and several scans later - I went to bed in the mean time - the laptop is almost performing up to it's specs and only a couple of stubborn malware entries remain. One of them being CmdServices, and Ad-Aware as well as SpyBot SD have trouble completely getting rid of it. I think it may be time to do some manual registry surgery!