Something is using a whole lot of memory after virus deletion

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Paul in San Diego (me_at_you.com)
Date: 12/29/04 

Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:38:15 -0800

I caught a virus last week which did not much more than introduce a lot of
spyware on my PC. Most of the spyware was easy to remove, and Norton AV
2004 got rid of the virus. It still shows a couple of instances of
'MALWARE' on the computer that it cannot delete.

Adaware 6.0 finds nothing. Spybot S&D is installed, as is 'HIJACK THIS'
which I had kill processes that I couldn't verify with google.

Bottom line is that now the machine is showing memory usage of 600-800 megs
of RAM with no programs running. Number of processes (including Norton) is
normal, about 35. None of the processes that I see are out of the ordinary
(I'm not new to this stuff and I normally know very well what's happening on
my PC)

If I use MSIE for net browsing, I get constant popups, and my popup blocker
is working hard. I now use Firefox to get rid of that problem. Bottom line
is that the PC is still not healthy, because the popups are a byproduct of
whatever malware I can't remove. How do I find out what is using all this
memory and the popups?

OS is XP Pro sp1 but the browser has had it's latest shots from Microsoft.
PC is 3.3G intel with 512Megs of RAM. Normal memory usage with no programs
running has always been about 200-250MB.

Suggestions appreciated!

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