Ad-aware woes.

The computer I'm using was rife with spyware when we bought it. (It was secondhand.) So, wanting to get rid of all of these nasty bits and pieces, I went to www.lavasoft.com, to download Ad-aware. I chose to download it from download.com, then had a nasty surprise - everything was wonderful after the download, until trying to install the program. An error message in German popped up, and it wouldn't go any further than that. After trying a couple of the other available mirrors, the same problem kept occuring. I've ran the virus program, to no avail.

Any help on what to try now, please?

Unless you speak German, I suggest getting the English version and going from there.

www.lavasoftusa.com

Then maybe you'll get what the error says:)

good luck killing your spyware.

I hate to say it, but you might just have to reformat. My downloads were all kind of loading funny until I reformatted and you don't know what's on this computer so it's best to reformat anyway.

If you bought it second hand, formatting the entire thing immediately should have been the first sensible thing to do :p

Are we talking about the free one, or the one for 27 bucks?

I'd suggest spybot, but... yeah, reformat. Do you have a windows disk?

You should have Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, Firefox, and HijackThis. That, and connect from behind a router. Do that, and you won't have many spyware problems. And if anything gets through all that, you can post your HijackThis logs on antispyware sites like Castle Cops and somebody will know how to manually get rid of your little bug.