At my wits end

I've got a doozey, and I can't find a thing on it. Foolish me picked up look2me, and I think I have gotten rid of that one, but sometime while I had it I picked up a new spyware which I think that one assisted in installing. When I restart, my homepage resets to

http://allaboutsearching.com/passthrough/index.html?http://www.google.com/

(for which I did a search for allaboutsearching here, but came up dry). Also upon restart I get a new search toolbar at the bottom of my screen, which through a careful look (I didn't want to click on anything in it, for fear of making it worse) I can't find who the company is, and nothing shows up in Add/Remove. I know its probably related to the above, but I'm hesitant to verify it without knowing where its from.

On a related note, as I was trying to get rid of look2me, I got CWShredder, which I have run. I'm now getting rundll errors approximately every 3 minutes, with the error message "error loading winupd.dll; the specified module cannot be found". Does anyone know if these might be related? The good thing is I think that run error is keeping more things from installing themselves, but I don't know what else it could be doing to my system.

I've run Norton, AdAware, Spybot, and SpyWare Blaster, if that helps, and nothing's been able to root this out.

Any help would be greatly appeciated in figuring out what I need to do to get my system back to a semblence of normal.

 

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The reason for the error is that winupd.dll was removed by Spybot but you still have a startup item trying to run the dll.

Run Spybot in advanced mode. Go to Tools and check box by BHOs to enable BHO (browser helper objects) management. Then click on BHOs in left menu panel and remove any suspicious entries.

 

I tried that . . . unfortunately it didn't work.

 

Tried Regcleaner in Deep mode and it didn't work . . . I'm currently going through msconfig again bit by bit, but it takes a while since it can take about 10 minutes to kick in after a reboot, and I have to go careful because I'll be the first one to admit I don't know much about what can be safely turned off and what can't. I'll update with what I find.

I thank you guys for helping me with this though . . . as I've been trying to remove this I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the workings of spyware so I can help others with the problem too. *snarls* I'm one person you don't want to tick off, and this &^%%^ thing has ticked me off, lol.