This thread is getting a bit far from mechanical music, but it is
an important topic for most of us.  One of the best ways I've found
to combat spyware and adware and various other scams is to change
browsers.  About 99% of the nasty stuff is directed at Microsoft
products and MS seems unable or unwilling to build in security.
It would probably take a ground-up rebuilding of a lot of their
software architecture to do it right, so I can sympathize with their
reluctance.  That doesn't mean we have to live with it.

I've switched to Mozilla Firefox as my browser and all of the junk has
disappeared:  http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/  On my kid's
computer AdAware used to find 2-3000 malicious files every week or so;
now it is down to ~10 a month with Firefox.  It's also faster and
includes a lot of nice features that Internet Explorer doesn't have,
and it is free.

As public source software it's got a very smart and vigilant community
of folks who care a lot about security making sure that there are no
holes and it's new enough that it was designed with those concerns at
top of mind.  I've also started using Mozilla Thunderbird as my
email/news client and, as well as being a much more pleasant reader to
use than Outlook, it also provides good tools for blocking the spammers
and neutering their misdirecting URLs.

It doesn't help with eBay scams, but you can escape the adware, spyware,
hijacked browsers, and a wide range of other dirty tricks that the
scammers use.

Cheers,
Roger Wiegand
Wayland, Massachusetts