> I can recommend Ad-Aware. My father's Windows 2000 computer had its Internet Explorer so filled up with commercial spyware that I got fed up with it. I downloaded Ad-Aware Personal Edition... or at least tried to. Something, I don't know whether it was spyware or not, in Internet Explorer kept redirecting me to an advertisement page instead. So I typed the ftp:// link directly into the browser, which caused the browser to crash.
> Fed up with trying to circumvent the spyware to download Ad-Aware, I ssh'ed to my university's Unix server, downloaded Ad-Aware onto my local directory there, then downloaded it to my father's computer with ssh file transfer, bypassing Internet Explorer entirely. That worked.
> Ad-Aware found 43 spyware objects, which I deleted all. Hopefully the computer should now be easier to use.


I also recommend dumping Internet Explorer in favour of Mozilla Firefox; it doesn't have the sorts of problems with hijackers like the one you describe above.