I was speaking to the same friend today, and told him about this thread. In the course of conversation, he said that sometimes the only way to get rid of something is to save to disk what you know you want to save, and uninstall *everything* else. Even the OS. Then you take your original disks and reinstall the OS and all your programs, etc.
I told him that I'd never even THINK of attempting that alone! LOL!
In the meantime, I bought Norton SystemWorks 2004 Professional. I decided that will be my first step (but not tonight).
Anyway, you may have to clean off the whole disk, as my friend discussed.
I've had to do this. My wife and I cleaned off a friend's computer that had so many popups and things that it was unusable. We had to put in a second hard drive, loaded Windows on it, and cleaned the original hard drive from there. After that we were able to boot from the original hard drive and run nortons and stuff.
Sometimes you have no choice but to reload from scratch, though.
Super. Now back your files, up. Reinstall Windows (i.e. Clean install), reinstall whatever files you want, install Systemworks and Ghost your machine. But only if you have a CD burner (that's supported by Ghost) or a second HD installed.
I promise you - it'll be well worth it. BTW - read the instructions on Ghosting...:-)
Once everything plays well with each other, use the Norton Ghost corporate version to image the system partition(s) to another partition on another drive; and burn it to sequential CDs also. I DON'T want to spend 3 days re-creating my monster:):)