I guarantee you that there’s at least one piece of spyware sitting there on your hard drive, invisibly passing along information about your browsing habits to some scummy company. What to do? Download Lavasoft’s wonderful Ad-Aware program, a free multi spyware removal utility that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely.
I try to keep my system running clean of spyware, but I ran Ad-Aware yesterday and you can see here what it found. Scary stuff.