Pre-battle checklist

Some of these have been mentioned already in the excellent FAQs by Thoey: faq760-4866, bcastner: faq608-4650, and manarth: faq608-3482 but I thought I'd gather them together in one place.

Most of the process of disinfecting a machine tends to become multiple iterations of scan & clean with a number of the various tools mentioned in the other FAQs. These scans can take a while and the process can be shortened somewhat with a little early preparation to reduce the number of items scanned.

1. Turn off System Restore. You lose your restore points, but the images generally can't be cleaned anyway so you don't want them lying around.
2. Clear everything from your browser cache. Delete all off-line content and clear all cookies.
3. Right-click your disk in Explorer and run the Disk Cleanup wizard on the General Properties tab. Make sure to get rid of all other temporary files, etc. that weren't cleared with the IE cache. Don't forget to clear the recycle bin.
4. Once you've worked on a few gummed up machines, you will start to recognize some of the nasties. Go ahead and get some of them out through Add/Remove Programs if you can as that's the cleanest way to remove them.

Depending on what was on your system, your scanners could now have quite a bit less work to do.

(While you're messing around in IE, it doesn't hurt to make a couple of settings changes to make life easier in the future: 3-5 days of history should be enough for most people as should 10-20MB of cache. The huge default cache is a waste of space. Also, under the Advanced settings make sure "Install on Demand (Internet Explorer)" and "Install on Demand (Other)" are both unchecked.

Now you're ready to step into battle as outlined in the other FAQs. Good Luck!