Some of those adware/spyware programs can get dug in. You delete them and they keep coming back. The trick is then finding the program that is "fixing" all the bad programs you are removing.
That's the handy thing about SmitFraudFix; it removes the components that were deposited by the spyware, including replacing the wininet.dll if necessary.
Adaware, and other programs that claim to work only treat the symptoms, but don't do anything to remove the dlls that were placed into the system, so it keeps coming back.
The worst spyware I had was several years ago where it replaced explorer.exe with its own version; it basically turned Windows into spyware, and the only way to defeat was to reinstall windows; unless, for whatever reason you may have done this, you had backed-up Windows core components and replaced them through DOS.
Even before that, there used to be a freeware program called HandyBits Virus Integrator that allowed you to integrate several virus scanners to run in tandem, and it worked to that function. It, alas, was also spyware that collected info on you. Of course, you could remove it from your system; on the way out, though, it would uninstall every hardware component in Windows and Windows would have to do a rescue and reinstall everything from the ground up. The truly embarrassing part is that many sites made this program available for download, and some even praised it for its features, even anti-virus sites.
I generally am comfortable with freeware from Major Geeks, but I would warn against trusting freeware, or even paid software, from a download site as most of them are only interested in having as many programs available for download as possible and getting anything listed is too easy. Download.com is one of the worst for this as they don't check things and have listings bloated with false reviews. They still have malicious software all over the site of which legitimate reviewers have screamed about to no effect. Which pretty much means check out reviews across several download sites to see what people may actually be saying about a program before downloading and installing it on one's system.
