There is no word for how much I loathe spyware. The thing is there is 4 people who use my computer on a daily basis, and 2 of them do not really understand how malicious spyware really is... plus not all that computer savvy and can fall for the stupid tricks that get you nailed with spyware and other crap.
I've burned away days of my life manually searching through registry files, booting up in DOS prompt, etc to get rid of this junk. One of the worst developments in this game is you get one on there, and it also acts as a trojan and downloads a hundred other malware programs onto your computer and then you are not doing this once but a hundred times. I feel lucky not to have to do this more than once every couple months.
Anyway, you might have heard that Microsoft bought an antispyware company and a antivirus company. Well you can download their beta version of the antispyware program now, and it is pretty hot. This thing is definatily worth adding to your arsenal, so go check it out if you run WinXP.