I lurked around this topic. As a person who faced a serious spyware virus that nearly crippled my computer (Fortunately, nothing important has been lost), I had to go to a good community that supplied me with a great cure. They suggested, after I obtained the cure, to use something that is not Internet Explorer as a web browser. Why? According to them, they stated that Internet Explorer, although not bad, so many viruses and spyware (Worms, trojans, naughties) go take the failures of IE to their advantage. I think they used FireFox or something, 'least that's what I'm using now.
Then they suggested, for a messenger, Trillian, since it's universal and worms (Or naughties) won't go because Trillian is so...private or whatever. That's all I can remember. But I do use HijackThis and Smitfraudfix to speeden up my old computer in my room. That's a pile of junk, unfortunately.
Need to find a way to speeden that up, can't defragment it and scan disk it, it fails...but I don't want to use ComboFix at all. If this seems like jabber to you, sorry, I'm a rambling piece of beeswax.