What I meant was in answer to the questions about what antivirus programs to get Owbist had given a list of good known programs, anytime you are going to get a program you do not know of always come here and ask so we can make sure you are getting a good legit program. There are many many of these rogue programs out there now and we try to keep anyone from falling for their tricks. They are serious malware that act like they are legit programs. You likely can not get the money back since you used paypal, I am not real familiar with their terms, but you are lucky you did not give them your actual credit card info so that part is good. The worst part is now you have a bad situation on your computer. My best suggestion is for you to follow my directions to go to the other forum and ask for help telling them you got Antivirus elite. If you need help posting there I can do that for you, I am there also. Just let me know if you want me to start the post there for you. They will lead you step by step using some specialized programs to get your pc cleaned up.

Ok this is simple now. Just use Google and type edit registry and millions of hits appear. Look through the first few and you will find many tutorials with good graphics showing step by step. You are nervous and rightly so because of all the warnings about messing up a registry. HOWEVER, this is nothing more than making a correction to a spelling error if you look at it that way. First time just go into the registry working down to the needed page. Once there you can walk away and grab a coffee if you feel stress, or you can make the simple correction to the one entry in question. Those of us who help others always need to stress the importance of caution in the registry because of those who are so impetuous. my ex son in law is a good example, he goes into a computer like a bull in a china shop. Luckily I do not have to clean up behind him anymore :) Now I have learned how to put stuff into a flash drive and save my files. Why? You are going to back up the registry as a precaution, nothing more. To save your work, assuming it is stored in My Documents. Insert the thumb drive, cancel the popup right click Start click Explore Now you see Windows Explorer opened Look near the top on the left side and right click on My Documnts click Properties in the pop up Look to see how large the My Documents folder is and if you have enough room on the thumb drive. We'll assume you have room. OK.... Click My Documents to highlight On the right side click the top item to highlight Hold down the Shift key and tap the End key now all the right side is highlighted right click anywhere on the highlighted data click Copy in the pop up Scroll down the left side now to find the thumb drive right click on it in the pop up click Paste and the contents are copied to your thumb drive - or any other drive you designate. Done! Simple huh?

Dennis, thanks for a well laid out list of problems. It does help those who feel they can see some or all of your problems. AVG is by far the most popular free anti virus and I doubt that is your issue. I would not remove that one. Spyware Doctor I know nothing about. If you have the original CD or the download stored on your computer you could remove it entirely using the Add/Remove and see if that helps at all. Superantispyware and or Malwarebytes could be alternatives to trying Spybot Search & Destroy. If you use Spybot S&D be sure it is in fact that program and not a sound alike rogue program. Have you ran any cleaners at all? Not registry cleaners but the Disk cleanup in the Accessories/System Tools folder of XP. Try that and a defrag, it will help modestly. Do you have Google or Yahoo toolbars and are they allowed to run in the background? The Google Toolbar has either 3 or 4 entries in your Startup and using your resources. Click Start click Run type msconfig click OK click the Startup tab Now check each of these items and decide if they do in fact need to run. Google each entry before deciding to stop one because if you stop the wrong ones the computer may not start again. If you stop any you need to reboot. During the reboot you will get a dire warning, do not be alarmed, place a check mark not to see it again and continue the booting.

There's a line between prudence and paranoia and I think some folks tend towards the latter. Everything that goes wrong with a computer, isn't the result of malware and viruses. There's a healthy dose of old fashioned user error in the mix and quite frankly some of these "help" programs cause more problems than they solve. It was a month or so back where we had a user, with one of these "help" programs who got a little overzealous editing the registry with predictably disastrous results. I don't know that Linux is the answer for the average user. It, unfortunately, seems to add a layer of complexity without a good technical support structure. There are also a fair number of users who use their computers for work and their employers require or support only certain applications and even operating systems. If the boss wants your spreadsheet in Excel, Linux isn't much help. Oh sure, you can run a Windows virtual machine inside of Linux but now you need two operating systems. I played with Linux back in my anti-Microsoft days but once I discovered NT, most of my problems went away.