Spyware and Adware Madness

It happened last night. My computer I have at my home was attacked by spyware and adware. These are malicious programs that install on your computer...usually without your knowledge...from the internet. My problem was that there was about a minute gap between bootup...amd before my firewall licked in. That was all it took...for shortly therafter...I was innudated with pop-up ads and bogus offers. I couldn't close them fast enough as they just kept loading up.

I checked out my startup menu options and discovered that many of the damn things automatically installed in that menu...so at bootup...they would load. This caused my computer to crash a number of times. I went in to the remove program window and got rid of some of them...BUT...apparently one of them had integrated itself into the Widows root system. Now Windows won't start up. Not even in safe mode. It says that a dll file is missing or corrupt.

I hope I can burn off a rescue boot disk that will work. I would hate to have to reformat that whole drive and reinstall windows...as I have quite a few files and photos on it I need. What a headache. Boy...do I hate adware and spyware! They should treat it like spam...and make it illegal.