A trip to PV to try and clean up a computer from a Virus Infection

So this afternoon I arrived in Palos Verdes at 1513 to see about cleaning up a Malware/Virus infection on the kitchen PC of some friends of mine.

4 hours later we sat down to dinner with his parents after I made almost no progress on fighting the infestation.  The *only* thing I was able to do was stop the massive pop-ups that were coming up on the screen of their own accord.

A yearly subscription to Windows LiveOneCare for 3 computers cost $49.95 and is good until 5/15/09.

Aside from having dinner and some pleasant conversation, the entire episode was an utter waste of time, as the PC is *still* infected and we will be re-doing it yet again, over the next two days.  This is one of the most severely  infected computers I have ever seen, as one of the profiles on the computer had the desktop wallpaper REPLACED with a giant, screen-wide, flash-based NETFLIX AD that was irreplaceable.

The Desktop wallpaper on that profile on that PC was locked down to where you could not change the desktop wallpaper image at all, not even with a change of themes.

Nothing for it but to nuke the hard drive down to bare metal and re-image the PC back to the factory shipping status.  Yuck.