In a word... Typical.

This is why, no matter what the problem, and especially if someone gets in to a problem with a virus that gets past all the nice layers of virus and spyware detectors and then even the firewall, which is all too common with anyone getting any kind of spam being listed publicly on anything other than a Bank Account on line, I always tell them the truth... There is no such thing as "recovery" with Windows no matter how you stack it, unless you are VERY lucky, when there was no real damage done to begin with. There is no Recovery. There is nothing but the endless hopeless cycle of worthless Free Advise and equally worthless Paid Advise, and it always leads back to the only common fix that always works unless your HD got fried or lost some sectors trying to re-write a bad sector; Kill It and Start Over From Scratch, meaning a HD Wipe and Total Re-Start from the ground up with all your software.

It can also be successfully argued that you have to do this every 2 to 3 years of usage because of the accumulation of bad outdated drivers that never leave even after your "controlled upgrade" of any program. Limitless amounts of crap gets left behind to cause more conflicts that are untraceable.

The best investment you can make is in an OEM store bought version of your OS that has no "extras" supplied with every computer as a trade agreement between the manufacturer and all their business buddies who pay them to send you software bundles they included that you will never use, because even if you take them off the minute you buy in, the leftovers are there to do the damage. The problem then, after you get the OEM version, like I did having to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro because they made it impossible to remove one program with the same type, is that you end up finding out that the "upgrade" (XP Pro) has no drivers AT ALL. Not even for a Monitor, Drive, Internet or ANYTHING. This means that you have to contact your PC Manufacturer first and get a recovery disc before your upgrade will do a thing, or you'll be stuck with an upgrade that can't even complete the upgrade process because there will be no way to connect to the internet to do it.

The deck is completely stacked against the user no matter what, and it's designed to waste a week of your life so it's actually easier to go and buy a whole new crap computer full of stuff you hate than to even attempt it, because it WILL drive you nuts. At least if you get through the process of starting clean without useless software and load up only the tried and true essentials there's a chance it will all work and stay clean until the next disaster, and you're always better off having all the extras tied in via USB, especially the drive that holds everything you want to keep. I'm staying with XP. Vista only makes everything worse. A lot worse.