I used to be able to clean up malware from people's machines. But more recently, I'll spend loads of time on it getting rid of the bad stuff, but it seems that they are so ingrained in the OS, that Windows just doesn't run right or doesn't even boot up at all once the crap is removed. I'm wondering how long it takes people to clean their machines typicall or ow much time do you spend before giving up / reinstalling windows and all the apps? Most recently, I was cleaning a person's 6 year old celeron that had the UAC rootkit. I think I got rid of all the bad stuff but now as soon as you log in in normal mode, it reboots. Safe mode works OK. Sure I could work on this some more, but wonder how much time it'll take and if it gets going now, will it run OK (it seems that after malware removal, the OS just isn't the same as it was before, even if the malware is completely gone). microsoft should hire these guys to write windows. You can't kill these malware, but windows crashes real easy : ) thanks!