CoolWebShredder

The third tool you should know about is CWShredder. This tool is designed solely to remove variants of the CoolWebSearch series of adware, but it does a very good job of it and is a very small download. CoolWebSearch is also very a common piece of malware, and is often difficult for even SpyBot and Ad-Aware to remove completely, so if there's something that neither Ad-Aware or SpyBot can kill, CWShredder can often take it out. Running CWShredder is extremely straightforward and will not be covered in detail here; just make sure you're running the latest version, since it is constantly updated.

You can download CWShredder from the Pomona College anti-spyware site. It requires no installation, although it needs some Visual Basic 6 libraries which should already be present on all modern Windows machines. (If by some chance you don't have them, you can download them here.)

If the automated tools are all crashing as soon as they start, then you've got CoolWWWSearch.SmartKiller, a particularly ugly version of CWS which attempts to stop SpyBot, Ad-Aware, and CWShredder from running. An updated version of CWShredder should be able to take care of it, if you run it more than once.