Bleck. I'm feeling kinda stupid today. I was looking for some cracking software. And for some odd reason nowadays that's way harder than it should be. The thing that makes it odd though, is not that companies are cracking down on the people making cracks, it's that more people who make cracks, now make entire webpages devoted to fake cracks which are just viruses and spyware bundled. So anyway, I downloaded an app that looked a tad suspect (or, at least more suspect than usual), and of course I ran it in a protected environment etc, etc. But unfortunately due to the way the guy made it, it wasn't recognized as being malichious, because all it did was download other files that were malichious. Normally this wouldn't have been too much of an issue to take care of, but my virus definitions were out of date, and so when it started to get out of hand, it REALLY got out of hand. So I got all my stuff together, ordered a frsh subscription to Norton Anti-Virus 2003, and scanned it. So far it hasen't found anything. What's more important though, was the impressive abilities (once again) of Ad-Aware.
It managed to delete 4,836 pieces of spyware (3,000 of which were just cookies though, so not all that impressive). That was most of the issue. It also found 2 actual running spyware applications, 3 "process modules" and 10 files, 4 folders, and a couple "possible hijack attempts." All the things it found were related to the dropper application, but it did basically render me computerless for a day. Anyway, I'm gonna go keep working on that. I'll be back soon to tell you weather or not I had to junk my comp for it.