Part of what I do as a sideline business is to remove viruses and spyware from peoples’ computers. That being said, I have run across some machines that had some pretty nasty infections that everytime you thought you had it ‘cleaned’, it would pop up again in another location. (Some of these things are written to prevent you from erasing them; they may self-replicate when you attempt to remove them; or they may be written to prevent detection (especially by certain products)!) If you moved the unit to another user, why not save yourself the aggravation and just go into “fdisk” and delete, the partition(s), reset them, reformat the machine and start over — then you KNOW you’ve cleared up the problem.

There are many spyware removal tools available. Some are good at some things; some are good at others; some are no good; and some are actually spyware themselves! It would not be the first time that I had recommended clearing of the machine and starting over — at least then you have no doubts as to whether anything bad is still on the machine.

When it comes to spyware, we have a rule that says if it takes more than an hour to repair the damage, do a bare metal install.That covers all our clients, corporate or individual.

My major client re-images all machines when users are changed, spyware or not. This prevents a lot of problems, and the new users has a fresh machine to muck up . I try to do the same with all my clients, but some don’t see the rationale of starting a new user out on a clean machine, or feel that it is not cost effective (though it really is as it prevent sreturn calls when a machine starts to head south, as they often do).

Save yourself the headache, reinstall the machine from bare metal, and have a good life .

Steve//