One of my wife’s colleagues had a computer problem…well, a problem with popups, popunders, and popallarounds, so prevalent, and so disgusting, that it was impossible to use the internet.

So my wife volunteered my services to get it “fixed.”

I have never seen such a huge collection of adware, spyware, highjackers, toolbars, search assistants, nasty dialers, and general gunkware on one machine. This colleague, it turns out, has two teenage sons…and you can just guess what kind of websites they’ve been looking at!

Now I don’t mind that, I was a teenage boy once myself, and although I didn’t have the internet, I surely took every chance available to have a look at what girls with no clothes on might look like. After all, I hoped to see one for real someday!

But, while “boys will be boys,” and so forth, didn’t anyone ever teach these boys not to just click “OK” to every little popup that appeared on the screen?

The very first ad-aware scan found over 700 items. Then Spybot S & D found another 450! Then there were about 27 more which could not be deleted by either program.

I had to boot into safe-mode and do some very tedious hand-deleting to get them all out. The toughest was a nasty little critter called “sysupd.exe.” That monster simply did not want to be deleted.

But (I think) I finally got rid of all of them, and now the internet is again usable on that machine….but it won’t be long until those boys have it loaded up again!

Somebody needs to teach teenagers…not only do you need a condom if you have real sex–you need the cyber-equivalent if you’re going to have screen sex!