I agree about the AV vendors not jumping on spyware soon enough. I was quite glad when Trend added the capability into OfficeScan--it does a fairly good job. However, they are a bit thin on their descriptions and technical information in their encyclopedia.
I had to remove something recently on a friend's home PC that even Norton, Trend, and Ad-aware didn't detect... a really nasty one that automatically reinserted its entry into the Run registry key, and restarted its process if killed from the Task Manager. Had to boot into Safe Mode (hahaha... accidently typed "Safe Mood" instead... wish I had that option sometimes!) to get rid of it. It's a bit scary for the average home user--the only real 100% safe way to fix a scenario like that is a reinstall. In this case, they might not have known anything was wrong, because none of those programs detected anything. I've talked with some people that are just getting rid of internet access--that's truly sad, I think.
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