Argh! Fucking hackers, fucking viruses...

Okay, so here's the short version of the story. I'm surfing along the other day, Saturday morning I think it was, and all of a sudden IE is going NUTS (yeah, more then usual) and I'm getting crazy popups everywhere, half of which are for porn sites and viagra, the other half for 'virus' scans, or messages warning me that my system is infected and I'll get in trouble with my boss & my spouse (no lie, one of them told me this.)

Turns out, I have the latest virus sensation that's sweeping the internet, some IE malware bug. Which I've now been trying to get rid of for three days. Most of yesterday was spent trying to get Anna to boot at all- she took this opportunity to have one of her little "haha, I'm trying to make like a Gateway and blow up" moments. I refer to these as Anna's little nervous breakdowns.

Anyway. Went out Sunday and bought the biggest, baddest new version of Norton I could find, which I'd been meaning to do anyway. Took it home, took a long nap, got up and started trying to install it. Turned out my older Norton stuff was SO old I had to uninstall it all before installing the new software.

I could have been smart and uninstalled things a piece at a time, replacing them with the new software before moving onto the next one. I wasn't smart. I downlodaded a huge Norton uninstaller, proceeded to run it, and let it reboot my system.

Cue crashes, fatal system errors, and lots of swearing. I went to bed Sunday night with things still screwed up.

Somehow yesterday I got it from fatal system errors to Anna's usual nervous breakdown crap, which I kind of know how to fix- you leave it alone for a few hours, come back, and keep trying to boot from a disk until it takes instead of crashing.

So now we're back in business, kind of, except that I can't use IE for anything without getting popups and freaking Norton the hell out. Add to this the fact that my connection's making like I'm back on dialup instead of DSL. Put it to you this way- I'm writing this on Mom's laptop, which IS on dialup, and it now seems to be running pretty fast to me.

So. I've run Norton, couple times. Run Adaware, couple times. Downloaded Spybot Search & Destroy today and am now running that. When that's done I figure on upgrading downloading Windows updates, upgrading IE... and downloading Firefox. It's not like I LIKE IE, just that it's all I've got, unless you count the anciet (4.7) version of Netscape I use mostly for my email. ...Yeah. I don't like change sometimes, what can I say?

Anyway. In case anybody's been wondering where I've been- well, there you go.

Oh, and if anybody's got any suggestions- been there, had this and got rid of it?- HELP! Email's about the only thing I can still get to without risking more crap trying to download itself, so I should be okay for reading comments.

And can I just mention how much this is sucking? I don't have that much vacation time left, and this isn't how I planned on using it.

...and sorry, I guess that was the 'not so short' version, but this has kind of been annoying me and I wanted to vent a little.

I REALLY don't wanna play anymore.

This just in- thanks to vayshti for IDing my virus. Now I know what it is, and it's one of the 31(!) things Spybot Search & Destroy got rid of. In theory we should be good now, but I'm running the scan again just to be sure. 'Cause, really? I don't wanna play anymore.

Edited to add:
Oh, for fuck's sake...
For those of you not following my chat with vayshti in the comments to the first post about this !@#$ing virus.... Um, I'm gonna be here a while. There are some 250+ registry values that have to go, containing as they do a nice Trojan, and for some asinine but unknown reason I have to delete them one at a fucking time. Whose freaking idea was THAT?
Anyone wants me, I'll be over in the corner beating my head against the wall.