[zeugma]

As an alternative to a lot of the stuff you mentioned, one solution that solves many if not most of the problems, would be to simply stop using IE. Download Mozilla and install it. You will be protected from popups, and a lot of the nastiness you encounter with IE. Aditionally, once you use tabbed browsing, you'll wonder how you lived without it.

[Long Cut]

I've been considering doing just that, if the problems continue. However, the latest reports I've read suggest that Mozilla is also coming under attack.

CoolWebSearch apparently has the time and resources to figure out all manner of mischief.

[mylife]

I just loaded firefox and attemted to delete IE but the entire uninstall folder is empty!

running mozilla firefox has made a tremendous difference.

Now to disable that nasty javascript BS

[Long Cut]

Is it difficult to replace IE with Mozilla? I've ben thinking about doing that.

Do you have any pointers? I'm still pretty computer-illiterate, just way more familiar with hijackers now.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

one solution that solves many if not most of the problems, would be to simply stop using IE. Download Mozilla and install it.

You are only half right. Unless your system is clean from all variants of the CoolWebSearch type trojans...Mozilla or Firefox will avail you naught.

Once your system is clean...and I mean CLEAN...then 'ol Moz will be a very good choice. (I love Firefox)

I spent 4 days fighting a CWS nasty on a friends XP system that had laid down a hidden file called "svhost.exe" in the Windows directory. Not "svchost.exe" which is an essential service launcer. This bastard would run every 10 seconds and replicate all registry keys and BHOs as soon as I would clean them. It would also not allow Spybot S&D to be run, nor its icon displayed, nor allow its executable to be seen when browsing my hard drive.
When I would go to Spybot's home page it would shut the browser down cold.

I could not simply delete it since it was hidden from Windows and no amount of searching or changing file attributes would change that. Unless I could get a hold of the C:\ drive before Windows did, I was out of luck. Of course with NTFS and XP, that wasn't going to happen. So I reformatted the drive and did a re-install XP. The little sucker is gone now, that's for sure...but it was a hell of a fight.