Thanks to the excellent advice and instructions published in the castlecops MRP wiki, I was finally able to remove that damn Vundo adware infection that I somehow had gotten. I'm currently processing over a 120 mails that had come in over the past 4 days, most of them being spam so it'll take me but a click on a couple of buttons to zap those.
While going over all the programs installed on my machine, I noticed that QuickTime wasn't updated yet, and the adobe flash player had a new version available as well. Coupled with an even stricter update policy and IT security for my machines, I hope to stay adware free for at least the near future - it's always a battle and a constant evolution on the side of the attackers as well as those defending and coding removal tools.