First and foremost, don't go to any website that offers "free" TV shows to stream. You'll be forced into options you don't want, and odds are the episodes you want won't be free.
OK, so I ended up with xVidly (the swine and unintentionally) and stuff that insisted on hijacking my browsers. I had some add-ons that could not be deleted or disabled (I fixed the FireFox add-ons by removing it and reinstalling it). My home page was being reset to their page constantly. Arses. My path to salvation:
1. Spybot first, removed a lot of stuff, but still had ads that I did not want that were not from Google on my Google search page. It had such a hard time it could not remove everything and asked if it could reboot and continue running. Sure, the first run was 15 minutes, the second was 30+. It worked hard, but it wasn't done.
2. I managed to uninstall television fanatic, their version of free is to redirect you to Amazon for free, the actual TV episode is another story.
Really? People pay $2/$3 to watch a show originally aired for free?
When attempting to uninstall xVidly I got the spinning circle for 3 seconds and then nothing.
3. I ran CCleaner, which did stuff, but no overall change. It has an unistaller, ineffective on xVidly.
4. I ran Malwarebytes. It found nothing, but I still had annoying ads. Including their ad, talk about lousy timing.
5. I ran across this thread:
http://malwaretips.com/blogs/remove-ads ... this-site/
Some replies liked ADW Cleaner. No install, just download and run. I ran a search and got back the contents of several files, which mean nothing if you're not a highly experienced admin. I despise being hijacked, so I clicked on delete. It went to town, and deleted a mess of stuff. I tried my Google page and the ads were gone. No blinking ads on search results and crap like that.
A xVidly icon sat on my desktop, annoyed I checked its properties and looked for the path. I don't know when it happened but its folder was gone. I canned the icon. It remains only on the Window's Uninstall Programs page. I can live with that. My old system had 2 entries on it from an ATI driver that was long uninstalled.
I'm bookmarking this thread for future reference.
The price I paid? Hours of frustration and some of my smilies on this page are now missing. And the horse you rode in on xVidly.
Yes, I am aware of malware and worse being able to hide on pc's. IE it's using the OS and file system against you. It seems pretty obvious that even when crap is hiding it has to exist somewhere, so it seems best to create an ISO image of your drive and just scan the whole thing. Don't know how you would actually get anything deleted with this approach, but I like the concept.
Thanks for the help.
Aris
We need a new general name for all kinds of "programs" that make a mess of your pc in whatever means they use. My suggeston is to call it
suckware.