Suspected spyware problem

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I'm visiting my relatives for the holidays, and my parent's PC appears to have some sort of spyware loaded on it that randomly causes words (or segments of words) to become green links.

 

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? If so, what program causes it to happen, and how can I get rid of it?

[Jobber of the Week]

Ad-Aware.

 

Teach them to run it and how to keep it updated. Tell them what spyware is and, to stay on the safe side, tell them not to trust any other program that tells them it'll get rid of spyware.

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

I downloaded the latest version of Ad-Aware from their site, but there seems to be something in the program that is incompatible with their OS (Win98... don't ask...); every time I run Ad-Aware, it crashes Explorer. I also ran Spybot, but that doesn't appear to have been very effective.

[Jobber of the Week]

Oy.

 

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

 

If there's no viruses or you can't get that to run either, they're either going to have to deal with it or wipe and make a fresh install of Windows. People who don't know about spyware until it's too late usually have messed their computers up beyond saving.

 

That the 9x OSes are about as stable as a house of cards doesn't help matters much either.