well i just recovered from 2 wasted days of dealing with a bunch of nasty evil malware/spyware - my fault for using IE, piece of crap. one of the trojans was a ransomware type of deal where they infect your system with spyware and then pop up windows and alerts to pay to get it removed with their software. the other nasty one was a zango type thing where they pop up windows with sites - lots of PPC search engine pages, google search results turn into links to other shady search engines - this one pretty much uses up almost all of a user's sytem's resources as it works away in the background.
on the good side, of all the sites popped up on me over 2 days - the only recognizable porn company working with these criminals i could see is Webcams.com.
huge thanks to this website
http://www.majorgeeks.com - their malware removal guides are the best and most thorough i've seen on the Net.