There are a wide number of free and commercial anti-malware and anti-spyware applications, many of which do a very similar job, in that they detect then quarantine or remove the malicious material.

Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that a single removal application is going to rid your system of spyware and a lot of the time, as soon as you have removed them, they return almost straight away.

HijackThis is a free scanning utility that scans your system, and notifies you of any changes made by spyware, malware or any other unwanted programs. It then creates a report, which displays the results of the scan.

This program does not determine or advise what is good or bad and will not automatically remove anything, but will allow the user to remove what they want manually. To help you do so, there is a large community of users in online forums, so experts can help interpret HijackThis scan results to clean up infected computers.

To analyse your computer, start HijackThis and run a scan. HijackThis will display a list of areas on your computer that might have been changed by spyware. Do not change any settings if you are unsure of what to do. There are many popular support forums on the web that provide free technical assistance by using HijackThis log files to diagnose an infected computer.