Surely you are right, but how should I know what to remove and what not?
Most of the time Ad-Aware will specify what kind of spyware the object
is (tracking cookie, VX2 object, etc.) Only in a few cases will it
not be clear.
Put each of the list of things Ad-Aware finds into the Google search
engine with the word "spyware" added and odds are you'll find it
referenced as such or not on one of the anti-spyware sites.
The main problem with this approach is a lot of people post their list
of files on anti-spyware and tech support sites to ask people which
items are spyware. This results in a lot of good programs showing up
in a Google search with the word "spyware", so you have to thoroughly
check the results until you find a site that specifically states the
search word is indeed spyware. Another way is to go to an anti-spyware
site that maintains a search engine of spyware and enter the program
name there.
What is unfortunate about Ad-Aware is that even with the latest
definition file, it will NOT find everything on your machine in many
cases. There will usually be a few items left that you will have to
find and clean out manually - or run another anti-spyware utility like
Spybot.
You need to examine your Task Manager list of running processes, spot
suspicious items, run a Google search on them, then if they turn up as
spyware, you have to boot into safe mode (so they can't reload
themselves by a Registry entry or protect a Registry entry), and then
delete the files and the Registry keys (careful about the latter, you
can hose your OS if you delete the wrong thing) involved.
I've spent hours getting rid of spyware on client machines - just
spent about six hours on this yesterday for a client just to get the
machine usable enough to install a new hard drive. They had at least a
half dozen running processes, a couple hundred files, six folders,
over 150 Registry keys - it was a nightmare.
