Unable to uninstall program & delete spyware

[nicky]

My boyfriend's computer recently took a hit, and my mom bought me a brand new desktop from when my house burnt down, though I also received a new laptop as a graduation present. I told my boyfriend he could use the desktop, however now it has problems. The font is hard to read, yet all the font settings are the same as my laptop. He told me to delete this program that was installed that might be the problem, but it won't let me! Everytime I trie it says setup.exe has stopped working. I tried to go to the source folder, but there's no uninstall option there. Can I just delete the folder and it be gone?

Also, I downloaded Spybot Search & Destroy, and it found 3 threats that I think could also the problem, yet when I try to delete them, it says I'm not logged in as the administrator and blah blah blah! I'm the only user! Help?

[tomws]

Deleting the folder isn't the best option, but I might try it. You'll need to use some kind of registry cleaner to clean up after that. CCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/) is free and good for that.

To run Spybot as an admin, it's better to login as the admin user (no, you're not the only user on the system - there's a hidden admin, too). Another option is to run the program as the Administrator from your current account. For Vista, right-click and select "Run as Administrator". For XP, right-click and select "Run as...", then Administrator. If the admin user has a password set, you'll need to know that.

FWIW, another good anti-malware scanner is Malware Bytes (http://malwarebytes.org/). They have a non-free program, but the scanner itself is free to use.