Just as a side note, I've been helping a "normal" friend of mine fix his WinXP box...where his web connection suddenly stopped working. He had Norton (anti)-virus installed, but that hasn't helped much. Running some malware detection tools on his machines I found FOURTY malware. Twenty or so adware, and the rest a nasty mix of trojans, backdoor software and irc bots (the kind used for DoS attacks). After removing all this crap, doing boot time virus scan, and more. His machine is still not good.
I turned to Google for some ideas, and most of what I found required me to use the command line.
Yes...you sometimes have to use that too on Windows, and what's worse, you sometimes need to edit the registry....which contains lots of completely incomprehensible data, binary keys and stuff.
I'm going back to his place later this week, to try and get his machine working properly (a re-install would be best, but he has lost his WinXP Home cd). It's not all bad though, as he's a great cook and generally cooks up something tasty for me while I'm hacking away at his machine.
p.s. Anyone know if I can use my WinXP Pro cd, to install WinXP Home on his machine. His license number is still on a sticker on the machine, but I'm not sure it works.