It may not be a case of someone latching on to your computer as such as installing loads of dodgy spyware on it (although people do this). It may simply be a case of someone using your PC, going to an infected site (by accident) and acidentally infecting your PC that way. Viruses and Trojans can also be delivered via email, usually as attachments, but there are ways to use an HTML email to infect certain machines.
I would recommend installing and running the following (all free):
Lavasoft's Adaware (
http://www.lavasoft.com). This is a good spyware scanner. If it finds any evidence of spyware, it allows you to delete it.
Spybot (
http://www.safer-networking.org/). This is partly a spyware scanner and remover (like Adaware), but also prevents known spyware installing itself (essentially, it tricks Internet Explorer into thinking the spyware is already installed, thus preventing IE downloading it again).
Javacool's Spyware Guard: (
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/). Similar to Spybot in that it prevents Spyware being installed, but it does this by monitoring the system for changes that Spyware is likely to make.
Microsoft's Windows Defender: (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx )
This is descended from Microsoft's AntiSpyware (which saved my PC on a few occassions), and works (again) by checking for actions likely to be performed by Spyware. The difference is that it checks for more actions that Spywareguard, and gives you the option to allow or disallow the action. It can optionally give a recommendation based on what other users of Windows Defender have done (so, for instance, if a well-known program needs to make changes to the registry, Windows Defender will look on it's network, find out that other users have allowed this change and recommend you allow it).
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