Windows Washing Time

Youngest son was up for the weekend.  Good time.  Anyhow he used my trusty desktop to do some email, and then he said "Dad, your computer is REALLY slow."  Well, yeah it had been slowing down bit by bit over time.  Youngest son suggested  blowing Firefox away and then re installing clean.  
So last night I started in on it. 
Ran Spybot Search&Destroy.  It found and zapped a buncha cookies, and some registry keys, none of which sounded particularly dangerous, but you never know.  Zapped them all. 
Then go for a clean install of Firefox.  Fire up Internet Exploder, Bing for firefox, click on the first reply, and then leave.  Click on Start->Settings->AddRemoveProgram.  Hit remove on Mozilla Firefox.  That goes OK.  Double check.  Fire up regedit and search the registry for keys containing Firefox.  Zap most of 'em, skip keys that look like pointers to Firefox for other programs to use. 
Go back to Internet Exploder  and click on Download.  This is not so good.  It tries to get me to download a couple of suspicious programs, a driver updater and a speed-me-up program.  Won't take no for an answer, both Yes and NO buttons get you to the download page.  Finally get to the Firefox download.  That trundles along for minutes, and then croaks.
  So, restart Internet Exploder, Bing for Firefox again.  Read the dozens of hits.  Second hit down is the official Mozilla website.  Click on that, and Firefox downloads and installs smoothly.  No suspicious extra programs.  Click on Help and then About, and Firefox updates it self to version 45.  And my bookmarks still work.   Moral of the story, If you Google for a something and get a bunch of hits, read each hit, try for the hit that looks like it's the maker's website.  By this time Trusty Desktop is running faster.  More like his old self.
  Download MalwareBytes, and run it.  It gets 11 hits, all on something names PUP.whatever.  Zap those. 
  Start up Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool.  Select "all files".  It's been running for 20 minutes now and has four hits. It's still running.  I'll zap all hits when it finishes. 
  So, Spring Cleaning for Windows.
1.  Empty the recycle bin and delete any files you don't need/want
2. Run every antivirus you have, and you trust. 

Free Anti virus programs

These are the ones I have used.  All of them are scanners, upon command, or perhaps automatically, they compare files on your disc with a list of known badware/malware, and post big "Gotcha" messages when they find a match.  They all take an hour or so to do your hard drive, and they all wait for you to personally OK zapping a malware file.  Just in case they make a mistake.  Which they never do.  Since new malware is hatched every day, they all have provisions to download updated badware lists.
   Most of them also install "realtime scanners" , programs that load into RAM at boot time and check all incoming stuff (email, email attachments, downloads) for badware,  These scanners slow your system down a lot.  I just removed a couple from my desktop, and the improvement in response is very noticeable and very pleasant.  MicroSoft Security Essentials is the worse offender here.  It slowed Blackbox down so much he was falling behind my typing.  When a 600 Mhz machine with a Gigabyte of RAM cannot keep up with my 10 keystrokes/sec hand typing, something ain't right. Blowing away Microsoft Security essentials fixed things right up.
   I have run all of these antivirus programs within the last few months.  The computers all survived the experience.  They are all free.  They are all fairly easy to run, you download them from the web, run 'em,  and tell 'em to zap everything they find.  None of 'em will find everything.  If faced with a difficult infection, try several of them.  What one misses, another might find.   

MalwareBytes.  A relative newcomer.  As a plus feature, no "realtime scanner".  He just scans the hard drive, once, and doesn't bother you afterwards.  Website BleepingComputer tipped me off to this one.

Spybot Search and Destroy  Been around for a while.  Started out as an anti spybot scanner and broadened out into scanning for most types of malware.  No "realtime scanner", a plus feature in my estimation.

Lavasoft AdAware  Another spybot scanner that has branched out.  Installs its own "realtime scanner" and whines when it finds traces of other antivirus programs on your machine. 

AVG   Another relative newcomer.  Still shaking the code down, but it works and does no harm.
 
ZoneAlarm.  Started off as a firewall and the latest version includes a disk scanner and a "realtime scanner".

MicroSoft Security Essentials   Fairly new from Redmond.  Effective, is able to block some pesky infections spread from websites.  CPU hog.  Slows your machine a LOT, all the time. Consumes up to 90% of your CPU time.  Difficult to turn off or remove.