Hello Martin,
The computer infected is a 9 month old Dell with windows xp. I am not sure what my friend was up to but he did admit to being on "the bad side of town" surfing the other night. He was surfing with firefox. To quote from "ContraVirus is a fake anti-spyware program that is often downloaded and installed without user knowledge or consent by a Trojan or through browser security holes. ContraVirus launches on Windows startup and may generate large numbers of popup adverts. ContraVirus will also display notifications of imaginary security risks in its attempts to get the user to purchase the full version. ContraVirus program can be extremely difficult to remove manually, and will continue to try to recreate itself. ContraVirus is thought to be related to VirusBlaster" This quote is quite accurate except that they could have added that it is hard to completely remove with spyware! Some small part of the cursed thing remains after even the most thorough cleaning, so that it can re-install itself on rebooting.
thanks, GR.