Spyware programs and Win 98

[Mayet]

I had a system (laptop win98 acer) in and it wasn't shutting down or surfing the net. First i put the shutdown patch on, that worked.....

I installed adaware (updated) and it looked on deletion with 567 items found including

dyfuca
bargainbuddys
internet optimiser
8 viruses
about five toolbars
popups and redirects

So I installed spybot, it blue screened on the clean. I uninstalled adaware and reinstalled and once again it locked on the delete. Then I ran it again and only deleted some easier ones, working my way down to find out which one locked it.

I got down to 200 items left and it started locking up badly. Then it killed the machine totally, wouldn't boot, in safe mode it gave explorer errors and closed. in normal mode it just tried to reinstall windows.
So i booted to command prompt and did my trusty when all else fails restore reg.

It worked to be able to boot up again and i reinstalled adaware this time doing it one by one. Finally it was clean
sfc was done scanreg, defrag and scandisk but the system was still not what i would call stable...then again win98 never is

I just wish there was a magic tool that did it first time everytime......

[Ferrit]

Remeber that often safemode is better to work on it then regular mode

[Mayet]

funny enough I tried it in safe mode after it wouldn't do it the 2nd try. First I put down to my error, the 2nd I was certain it was the spyware doing it so i tried safe mode. it missed 450 items including the ones mentioned above.

Normally safe mode works but this time it didnt, it was like it was only attacking the spyware loaded in startup and wasn't attacking the stuff that didn't load in safe mode. It should have got both..dormant spyware as well as active stuff.