My pain and my joy

The pain!
I'd been surfing on the net at nothing in particular. You know how it is, you read one thing and then click a link and then something on the next page refers you onward still and internet page reading becomes a series of clicks.
I have a firewall and an anti-virus and an anti-malware and yet still something got through.
I hadn't noticed anything and had no alerts whatsoever. When I closed my browser I found that I had two icons for firefox. This was understandable since I actually downloaded and played with firefox version four.
I wasn't completely happy with it and a lot of my add-ons were suddenly no longer compatible. I thought I'd give it more time to give the add on people more time to make compatible versions and uninstalled it and went back to 3.6.16. I switched off my machine and settled down with Hitomi.
The next day when it came to switching on my machine it took longer than usual but it eventually came. I was on Google search looking for something and smiled to myself as I found what I believed I was looking for and one little click and....
...this was not the page I wanted. I was on some page asking me to buy 'stopzilla', ironically an antispyware program. I went back to the search results and clicked again. This time it took me to e-bay. I went back to the search results and tried an alternative link. This time it took me to a page entitled "Gimmeanswers".
You can imagine my frustration. I knew by now that I'd picked up a hijacker and somehow the little devil had got in past all of my defenses.
I opened spybot search and destroy and let that do its job. It found a few tracking cookies and one trojan and told me that my security was off. I allowed it to fix what it had found.
Then when I went into my security and found that it had all been switched off and my windows update was also unavailable. I could not even open the Microsoft page manually. I cound not access any of these things, I'd lost control or ownership.
I re-booted and cleaned out all of my temp files using CCleaner, which is a wonderfully effective free program and I still had the same problem in the search engines!
I scanned with 'malwarebytes' and it found one more. After a reboot I still had the problem and so scanned with Super-Anti Spyware. This found even more trojans and after it killed them and I rebooted once more and I was quite upset to find that I still had not cleared the problem.
I was getting blue screens of death all the time as I tried to clear this problem.
I looked on the net and found one or two others had suffered from the gimmeanswers re-direct problem. It seemed to be cured by installing and running the TDSSKiller.exe from Kaspersky.
My computer would not let me install from within the folders and so I had to do it on my desktop. 
Finally this found a root-kit baddie deep down in my system and promptly killed it. After another reboot it seemed that my problems were over and I sighed a long sigh of relief.
I could switch on my security again and I could turn on windows update and I could click on the pages in the search results without being redirected!
I still get re-directs every now and then because something is there that none of my defenses can find.

When I use the registry cleaner it constantly finds alterations in my HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\ asmx,smi and smil
How very annoying!

My joy!
This week-end Hitomi and I are going to Shikoku for a break from the city.