I cleaned out a bunch of spyware from my mom's computer today. She said every time she opened Internet Explorer. The desktop would be flooded with popups, the cd-rom tray would go in and out, and a voice would keep crying out "Help!".
I had tried out AdAware many times and this stuff seemed to keep coming back. So, I tried out Bazooka http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/, it doesn't remove the ad/spyware just scans and provides instructions to remove it. It took about a hour or so to remove everything.
Afterwards I download the new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and installed it to replace Internet Explorer, hopefullly it will stand up better in stopping evil-ware.