"Dad, the Internet's broken again."

update I finally surrendered in this case and renewed my daughter's antiviral, for $55. I would rather have her choose when to make the Linux switch. The anti-viral did, finally, get rid of all the malware, although we lost a second evening to it and she wound up writing her last paper on my own machine.

Actually it had been breaking for some time, I learned. My lovely daughter is a big fan of Fanfiction.Net, a site where kids are allowed to post their own stories based on popular characters. (Think Harry Potter meets the Three Stooges.)

It's a harmless avocation but it comes with a price. Fanfiction is filled, absolutely filled, with spyware and malware. Ad pop-ups were filling her screen, and no matter how many I clicked away (even if the browser was turned off) more appeared. She had been running an anti-spyware program, but it had not been updated. And her anti-viral had just expired.

The solution seemed simple enough. Her anti-spyware program was updated and deployed. But here's a dirty secret of our time. Most adware today is no different from a virus.

All the tricks of the virus creep were deployed to keep crap like eZula infesting my girl's PC. Copies were hidden in memory, in the restore directory, in directories under program files. (None had ever asked permission, nor told her what it would do.)

When I deployed Spybot in normal boot, the spyware was so thick (download this, click here) the program actually stopped -- the pop-ups and demands to download more garbage were a primeval forest. When deployed in "safe mode," there were several "problems" that couldn't be eliminated. Re-boot and start Spybot again? Well, dozens more spy-virii popped up during the re-boot.

But wait, there's more.

The other PCs on my network all run Trend Micro's PC-cillin, which combines anti-spyware and anti-viral features. Windows XP now claims to have these capabilities as well. But my daughter's PC is nearly five, and I learned (after some hours of pain) that the new version of PC-cillin won't load on her 733 MHz H-P with Windows ME.

I have also noticed something else. We now have 5 PCs on our network, serving four people. (I have a laptop as well as a desktop.) If we all need PC-cillin, or something like it, we're spending $250/year on anti-spyware tools. Trend Micro charges just $140 for its five-pack client-server suite, but ours is not a client-server network, just wires (and one WiFi link) connected via Windows XP. We're a family, not a dental office.

My guess is there are lots of people in my exact situation, families with kids, kids with PCs, dads suddenly turned into network managers, into security managers, and we're all looking for help. We are not geeks, we are just homeowners, so we need something that works -- both technically and financially -- within these new environments. There is a big opportunity here.

Meanwhile, my daughter is stuck. We tried everything, even doing a "recover" of her operating system, but the spyware is still there. All I can do now is copy her personal files over to a CD and format the drive. Not fun. And the Internet may be broken all weekend while this goes on. (You may not be served many of these tasty blog snacks, either.)

And what if that does work, for now? How do we protect an old PC for the long haul? We may have to buy a whole new box...and if we do it may not run Windows.