Customer calls with an infected PC.

They had trend micro pc-cillin, and went out, purchased, and installed norton IS.

Hmmm, 2 antiviruses can spell trouble.

Plus the system has a few annoying popups at startup time, plus a browser hijack to sites like search-earth.com and pcsecuresystem.com

In the past, browser hijacks usually indicate a severe, and difficult to remove, infection.

Since the infection had only been on the system for about 4 days, I found it surprisingly easy to clean up the infections (after uninstalling trend IS).

hijackthis is a wonderful (and dangerous) tool for this.

Since this PC is used by a few people (and in 3 months, it had accumulated 1800 files in the temp folder), I decide to install BHODemon, Winpatrol, SpywareBlaster, and emptemp2.

I also start a defrag just before I leave, just to give the PC a bit more of a speed boost, as it was getting sluggish for a 5 month old XP PC.