Last night after doing a system scan for certain things listed in the Compromised Account thread, I found a backdoor.dll file in my registry, along with a couple of other things in the same folder. I deleted that whole folder per a friends suggestion, and I searched for the stuff again, to make sure it still wasn't there. One of the things I had looked like a keylogger, but I was never hacked. Guess I got lucky. This made me wonder what else I had on my pc though.
I have McAfee, which I know isn't the best, but it came with my PC and has stopped things from time to time. It found nothing. I was still wary though. So I did a little bit of research and saw that Spyware Spydoctor http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor/ was something that was suggested. I paid for a subscription, lo and behold 10 minutes later, I had a shitload of stuff found. 4 threats and 99 other things removed. I was shocked. I removed all of this stuff and did a deep system scan afterwards and only one thing was found. I then removed that. Did another scan and it found nothing, used Spybot and all it found was some cookies. CWShredder found nothing.
I'll admit my main problem was I was using IE 7 for the longest. Yes, yes I know. lolie and all that other crap. But I finally installed firefox w/ noscript and everything last night. I am still concerned for my systems security though. I know the easiest way to get rid of everything is to format. I did this a few months back and would really like to avoid this if possible, but am willing to do it if I have to. I know it's my best bet.
My question to the knowledgable people here though are a couple things. For one, should I use any other programs than the ones listed above to help find stuff? Mcaffee did nothing, so that lead me to believe it was pretty useless. Spyware Doctor seems awesome, as it founds lots of shit. Is there anything else I should get?
Secondly, I do have HiJackThis and was wondering if I took a log of the results and posted it here, the people that knew what to remove could tell me. I could always log onto a bigger tech forum, but there are a lot of smart people here at BG.
Thanks for any help and suggestions.