In all of my years of being a system administrator I have never seen a machine as infected as I saw today at my sister-in-law’s house. When we turned on the machine, the fist sign of problems was that it did not go to the normal home page. When I tried to do a search the links on the results page did not work. Naturally my sister-in-law did not know what happened. Since the MacAfee software had expired and my sister-in-law was fussing about the cost of virus checking software, I downloaded a current version of Microsoft Essentials. I had to reboot the machine into safe mode with networking support before I could download the current virus and spyware definitions. Microsoft Essentials found a multitude of Trojans and worms. I cleaned the computer and rebooted several times. Finally I decided to perform a full scan before clicking on the “Clean†button. The full scan took a long time but the computer is now working as expected.