these anti virus programs come with MANY different names. Some of them are pretty hard to remove. My sister and my mom have both had one in the past 6 months. There is a safe mode version of windows 7 with very limited startup that I booted to and just popped in a USB stick with a few tools and the first thing I ran was spybot and that actually removed them both just by booting into safe mode. Like you said the computers were unusable in the normal boot with like a thousand error popup screens.