a friend of mine (travis), recently had antispyware 2010 installed on his laptop. his attempt at removing it caused more problems. such as “Choose the program you want to open this file” dialog popping up when he tried to run anything. i walked him through some basic attempts at troubleshooting and was pretty close to calling it quits and thinking that windows simply needed to be reinstalled.

last ditch effort was to do some googling because i imagined that other people had this same problem. of course, other people did have the same problem.

reference and solution:
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6132_102-0.html?threadID=384167
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

my personal opinion is that it’s extremely unsafe to web browse at all from windows xp. even with the latest SP and critical patches, firefox or IE 7/8, and antivirus/antispyware installed. that probably seems like a huge exaggeration…but i don’t think so. even if you just browse legit sites at some point a search result might bring you to a malicious site. or you might simply mistype a URL, etc. sooner or later you’ll get burned and not realize how all the crapware got installed on your computer. an exception may be that if you have browser security at near max, but then all the security dialogs popping up make web browsing painful.

my point is stop using windows xp. if you have to use windows at least use vista sp2 or windows 7.