acroyear | finally killed a bug

something slipped into my computer that nothing seemed to want to get (malwarebytes, hijack this, superantispyware, avg - all never found it). the symptoms:

windows update wouldn't work, causing multiple running (and useless, but completely valid) instances of wuauctl.exe
google search results would look fine, but clicking on a link would take you to some random site's search page
firefox would occasionally just randomly open tabs to random search pages

What it was? TDSS, a backdoor bug that attached itself to the cdrom.sys driver file.

http://usa.kaspersky.com/ had the fix, here.