[StreamOfTheSky]

Thanks for the link, Rackhir! It was very imformative, though some of those things never happened to me (and I never chose 'yes' to anything, though apparantly that's part of the scam), and some other things happened to me not in the article. Including the blue screen of not-death, which happened any time I let my computer go idle. This guy talks about it, and his comment in general intrigued me:

Spoiler:

Posted by "Chris"
It gets worse
i have been inundated with these things at the university where i work.

they come in thru bad blog spam, myspace bot spam, phishing emails, the works.

some of them pop up phony bluescreens, complete with fake restarts of windows, either via fullscreen animated GIFs, or by using a BSOD screen saver.

the only way i was able to spot one infection was that the "bluescreen" completed it's dump of physical memory and "restarted" windows. think about that for a minute. it's called the blue screen of death because it's the last action your computer takes before it locks up solid. there is no coming back.

someone has poured a lot of time and energy (and presumably money) into these scams.

these are not students playing a prank. this isn't some lonely guy in his mom's basement. these are real programmers at work, and they are probably backed by someone with money. this is not an automated attack that you can fix with automated tools. new versions are hitting every day, manually re-engineered to slide past anti-virus and anti-spyware tools. this is a human powered attack and it requires a human powered counter attack.

this isn't crime. this isn't a random act by an individual or a group. this is a coordinated attack by a growing group of motivated professionals. this is a war.

As for me, my friend didn't need to reinstall everything. He got the root kit out with SDfix, then multiple scans with other programs got all the hidden system files. He left me with SuperAntispyware, Malwarebytes, and Spybot S&D, telling me to scan with Spybot and then download/install Avast at home. I've done so, Spybot caught 7 items, and got rid of all except a keyboard hacker, which multiple reboots and retries have failed to remove. I'll have to ask him later today, kinda worrying me. Other than that, everything's fine now.