Death to virus/malware makers

Sometime in the past, my dad's laptop got infected by something or other. No idea what it was, but I should have known it was trouble when my brother logged in and saw "WeatherBug".

I discovered a few things.

Whatever's been planted in that system? It's buried deep. It's making hotlinks out of random stuff in Internet Explorer. It's generating popups, grabbing keywords from Google searches, and so on and so forth.

And it's not being picked up by most spyware or virus scanners.

Some seem to find it, kill it, but ... it keeps popping up. I spent half of yesterday (from about 2pm to 11pm) playing whack-a-mole with the damned thing.

Things I've learned:

1) While Microsoft XP Service Pack 2 is recommended, installing it with the damned virus still in place isn't such a good thing.

2) Norton Antivirus is for &$@%.

3) The next person who says that the way to solve this problem is to get a Mac? My response will be to throw them out a window, drop a filing cabinet on them, and set them on fire.

And whoever wrote that bit of malware? I'm gonna be really upset with them.