Those spyware programs are more malicious than any virus I have ever encuontered! 5 minutes after I visited a site (didn't download anything or click on a download prompt), adaware finds some 370 spyware program components and like 5 folders of crap. I got rid of them, but they came back because there was some sort of program reinstalling all of them when I restarted. My homepage was changed, I got some sort of toolbar installed above my start menu and popups for porn websites came every 30 seconds reguardless if I was using internet exploder or not. I finally used Hijack This to remove the components with help from tech forums. I also had to install peperfix and run that as well as go into safe mode and delete some more files and folders.
And that's why I switched to mozilla firefox.