Add/remove programs
First of all, thanks for the good advice on the FAQ thread about removing spyware etc - I've downloaded and run AdAware and Spybot today with good results after having strange pop-ups appear. I've also bought and run Trend Micro Internet Security in response to these painful occurrences.
However, there still seems to be some problems with our computer (Windows XP, fairly standard kind of PC) that I'd like to ask the experts about -
Since these things started appearing (I think), I was unable to run task manager (a message came up saying something like 'The administrator has disabled task manager', but that problem's been fixed by Spybot; what's still happening, though, is that when I try to run 'Add / remove programs' from Control Panel, it says 'wait while the list of programs is being populated', but the list never appears - you can hear the hard disk working, but it just keeps going with no result.
Can anyone shed light on this or point me in the right direction to solve the problem? Spybot, AdAware and Trend Micro all say they've scanned and fixed everything they've found, but it seems all is still not right.
Thanks very much.