I frequently get asked to solve little computer problems that people are having and more and more frequently lately the problems come from spyware. In the past I have always recommended www.lavasoftusa.com and their AdAware Personal Edition. I've been using this software for a while now and love it. I stumbled across a beta release of an anti spyware software from microsoft this morning. It's free for now, but it has a real time component that always runs in the background and catches spyware as it is being loaded onto your system. So I'm going to give it a go and see how it works. You can find it here.