Frozen AIM and # in the address bar

To be totally honest I'm not sure I have a spyware problem, but seeing as I'm about 99% certain that is the case I thought this was the appropriate place to log my problem...
Several weeks ago two strange things began to happen to my computer. First I noticed that when I typed an address into the address bar of internet explorer (i.e. 'yahoo.com') I was given a message that read 'Cannot find page #yahoo.com'. The pound sign was somehow magically appearing before any address I typed in! I did notice that if I typed in 'www.' before the address (i.e. www.yahoo.com) that the problem was alleviated. Thus, except for the minor annoyance, I was too worried; BUT sites like chat.yahoo.com are not preceded by a www. and I cannot reach them whatsoever, which is a problem. I haver since upgraded to a more recent version of internet explorer and I no longer recieve the # message, but instead I'm simply directed to an error page. Very frustrating.
Second (although I'm 99% these two problems started almost simultaneously), my AIM freezes up every time I open a IM box. I went to the AOL site and located a page that dealt specifically with this. It asked if in my Add/Remove Programs there were one or more of the following three programs: Home Search Assistant, Search Extender, and Shopping Wizard. I check and lo and behold all three were there! Problem solved, I thought, but no- they were un-uninstallable! AOL recommended I download Ad-Aware, so I did; I ran it, it found 337 dangerous or questionable items in my computer. I removed them all and the three aforementioned programs did indeed appear to be gone. Yet AIM still had the same problem. Later I checked and the three programs were back! I've run Ad-Aware a number of times now and each time it locates 100+ dangerous or questionable items, and each time the three programs disappear and then soon reappear, and NEITHER of my problems (the # in Internet Explorer and the freezing of AIM) have stopped.
I have also run several scans with Symantec's most recent version and they found nothing, so I assume it is not viral.
Any help offered would be greatly appreciated.
Dan Shattuck

 

Very sorry. Went through all of the steps in the READ THIS FIRST thread and all my problems are gone....