Yes it is a lot of information, and I understand your frustration. I thought you would like to read up on something by searching the tutorials, instead of just asking. If you post questions here, there are many helpful members that will help you.
Your first post in this thread was you venting your frustration, I was trying to help.
Yes, a week of chasing this problem made me really tired. I started to identify with the icon on my screen, going around in circles forever. I appreciate the help.
Larry it sounds like you need to do a clean install and start over.....doesn't a clean start sound good?
Larry, have you finished with Cottonballs help?
There is a lot of brilliant advice to be had from this forum but it requires a fair degree of patience if you are having problems. Remember that most, if not all, that offer their help are doing it in their spare time and are not getting paid for their help.
As has been mentioned, take a look at your "surfing" habits. Make sure that you have a decent and fully up to date AV running at all times but don't rely on it 100% to keep you out of trouble. If you need to download something then do a bit of research first, do you need to down load it in the first place?
Finally, if you do need to do a fresh install then follow the tutorial from start to finish and don't be tempted to cut corners.
If you stick with it you will get your system running perfectly. Good luck mate.
Andy
Excellent help by Cottonball, but...
Larry666 has a point, all the crapware that installs without the end users' knowledge and/or consent is getting ridiculous. Legitimate software updates may want to install other software as well and if the end users are not paying attention, they may end up with Chrome as the default browser, ask.com browser plugin, etc. And that's just the legitimate side of the software. The adware and other crapware don't even seek end users' consent to install and not easy to remove some of them. Take for example the MS owned atdmt.com based advertiser network, good luck getting rid of that on Windows...
Following one of the suggested solution by Cottonball for junkware removal, my system with IE10 gives this error message:
Disabling MSE's real-time monitoring didn't help, the same error message popped up. Downloading the same file with FF had no such issues and the program ran just fine with MSE real-time protection enabled. So it's not Windows 7 or MSE, it is IE 10 that decided to block this executable. It's probably due to some "lack of certificate" for the program...
The point is that most people don't know, don't want to know all about this. They just want to use their computer and chug along. Certainly, Larry666 does have point from that perspective...
OP is sounding like a troll, took me 1 minute to find the info/solution:
Remove SweetIM toolbar and search.sweetim.com (Uninstall Guide)
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