I suppose this falls into the 'productivity' category because it certainly eats away at your productivity if you don't watch it.
I installed a piece of software recently that is 'free', but came with an offer of a toolbar. I said not to install it, but somewhere along the line I got it. It had an 'uninstall' button on it, so I pushed it. it popped a box that said to exit IE,then press OK which I did, and when I restarted the browser it was back.
So next stop Control Panel, uninstall.. nothing... now I am starting to hear the warning going off in the back of my mind somewhere... like what you hear on the WWII submarine movies.
I tried to control the mad scramble for tools to repair whatever was going on, and in a parallel effort went to TomCoyote.org logged in and at the same time did a search for '888Bar'.
I was looking on TomCoyote to see where the instructions are, and there's sooooo much information on their site, I found myself in the self-help area.
Meanwhile I found a forum page at Spywareinfo that specifically discussed 888Bar. The TomCoyote folks probably wouldn't like it, but I followed the directions about halfway down for removing the HKCU reg key for running that sucker. After an IE restart, it was gone... just seeing it off the screen was enough to settle down to start the trail back.
I followed all the instructions on that TomCoyote page. I downloaded and installed a new copy of Spybot Search & Destroy and ran it... it found more than 888Bar, unfortunately... and removed them all, thankfully (on Thanksgiving too!).
Then I downloaded and ran a new copy of Ad-Aware, and let it find a couple things.
Then I downloaded and ran a 30-day trial copy of AVG Anti-Spyware in Safe Mode, as instructed. This found some more crap, but a couple things I knew were NOT crap also. I had it remove the genuine crap.
Then restart in normal and run AVG Anti-Spyware overnight. The only things it found were the un-crap ones from last night.
Then downloaded and ran ATF Cleaner -- you have to go get this one! ... cleans out all those caches and buffers that you never remember where they all are.
Then I rebooted and downloaded and ran a new copy of HijackThis, and dang if I don't recognize everything that's in there. There's more than you'd think, but it's all there for a reason, so I'm feeling pretty good about my system's state right now.
That page from TomCoyote has ALL the download links for this stuff, and another page they reference is one at Security Central. All free downloads.
I've decided to let the AVG AntiSpyware software run for the 30 days and see how it goes.
Sometimes the 'old days' of no viruses and no spam are very appealing. And I didn't mind much the black and green screen either :)