Fair enough. It's perhaps slightly ironic that by the time you've done enough scans to realise you might need it, you could have reinstalled and restored your data anyway.
I work part time in repairs and it seems with Vista/7 (and XP most often) it's easier and faster to format. It's quicker for us, so we can turn around more jobs, and there's less chance of any further problems. Customers are also happy for the same reasons and the performance boost they see because of all the rubbish they had installed. We do data restoration too for emails docs etc.
Gone are the days of using Windows 98 and hijackthis to find what's killed ie, then manually deleting it!
@ OP, if combofix doesn't sort it, or you can't get the prog, I'd cut your losses now. I have all my data on a separate partition to windows so a format is easy. All you do once formatted is point 'my documents' towards the folder on the other partition and do the same for other paths etc. I then just install progs when I need them. I also have steam installed on another partition, so then I can just reinstall the main program into the same directory and it saves transferring all the games.
