OK, here's the anti-Spyware guide that I wrote in work and sent round the office. I haven't heard of anyone having spyware problems since.
This was mainly cribbed from another page and written by someone who knows what he’s doing. My comments are inverted. - Ian Wright, 03 June 2004
Spybot (
http://www.safer-networking.org/) and AdAware (
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/). The ONLY two spyware removal tools to trust. Do NOT buy any spyware removal tools, because none of them work better than these two, and all of them except these two are suspect.
SpywareBlaster. (
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html)Will nuke twelve hundred different potentially malicious ActiveX controls, and now has the ability to prevent a number of non-ActiveX methods of installing spyware for people who use Mozilla/Firefox.
SpywareGuard (
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareguard.html). From Javacool, like SpywareBlaster. It's a real-time scanner for spyware. A decent first line of defense.
IE-SpyAd. (
http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/resource.htm#IESPYAD) Throws numerous ad-related URLs into IE's Restricted Zone, where they won't display or affect your system. Bookmark this one, since it's the only one that doesn't have an in-program update.
Only download them from the links provided above.
With AdAware and Spybot, check for updates using their internal update function at least once a week. Run them at least once a week or whenever you think you might have problems. Remember, the new version of Spybot has browser protection capabilities, so have that run at startup and leave it running. Check for updates to SpywareBlaster once a week. It only needs to be run once initially in order to establish protection. Then, after it downloads updates, just click on the line that says "Enable Protection For All Unprotected Items" (definitely run that one, since they just put in another database update in the last couple days) and kill it. It doesn't need to be active. For IE-SpyAd, bookmark the site and check for updates twice a week, since it has no kind of internal updater. Since all it does is add Registry entries, it doesn't eat up anything.
NOTE THE NEED TO UPDATE IE-SPYAD YOURSELF. After your initial install run the update tools to get the latest versions of what they should protect against.