Well, much to the consternation of my wife,

I spent about 5 hours last night chasing crap out of my computer. It's not completely clear yet, but I think it might be usable again. I may not have to wipe the hard drive and reload everything (which would have taken less time, but I'd like to get our pictures onto discs before doing that).

My big mistake is that I haven't updated my boot disk since 2001, so it's unable to actually clean any viruses that are out, though it seems to have the power to kick the crap out of them, and the buttload of adware that got dumped on me, enough so that I could use the antivirus software I have.

Time to upgrade a few things though.