Work experience

Main tool which I use to get rid of parasites in Windows (such as spyware, viruses, toolbars and other annoying ActiveX) is HijackThis or HJT. It shows potentialy dangerous registry records, startup items and so on. But be careful – it also shows good items, eg. flashget plugin for IE, windows updates, all startup items. So you need to know what each record or app do. When I’m in doubt, I look at exe, dll files’ properties and if there is no description, search filename in google. And some forums such as http://www.merijn.org/

If you dont know how to use HJT – read tutorial and be very carefull, do registry backups!

You can download HijackThis here Official HJT page
And if you have no VB runtime libraries you can download them here VB runtime libraries download
UPDATE: accidently found this page. Great hijackThis log analyzer. Usefull for hjt begginers.

If you ever needed to save lots of pages of website, you know, that best solution for that is offline browsing soft. Web grabbers or whatever theyre named :)

They crawls through links in that site and downloads html’s, images and other stuf (depends on options mostly). I tried Teleport-Pro, its fast and simple, but its shareware, so I needed to find free alternative. And this program is called HTTrack.
Its fast, free (GPL), easy-to-use, opensource offline browser utility. It has lots of options and also simple wizard. It fits and beginners’ and proffesionals’ needs. There are Windows and *nix like system versions. So I recommend you to use this app.