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Various tools
Like Dojo mentioned, I haven't encountered any tool that's 100% effective. From my experience, Combofix fix seems to be pretty good at handling rootkits, but while it's simple to use, it's not a tool intended for the inexperienced at dealing with malware, e.g. in case its cleanup results in an unbootable PC. Malwarebytes seems to catch a bulk of the malware, including fake AVs that I've seen Symantec/Norton, McAfee, Avast, AVG, Microsoft, etc. all miss. Over the past year, I've only had seen one case where both Combofix and Malware bytes didn't clean a machine, but was able to find the culprit using the SilentRunners script (works similar to Hijackthis, but doesn't have removal capabilities.) Also, anti-malware tools typically work best when run in the safe mode, as some malware will only run in the normal mode.

I haven't used Spybot in a while, since I find it takes too long to run a scan, however, it's still very useful to have as it can be run from a bootable PE (e.g. BartPE), which is useful for cleaning a PC where the malware prevents tools from running in the safe mode or have another check for rootkits (which become well hidden when booting the main OS).
Posted by Sean Byrne
9th Mar 2010