Okay so here’s the log after the machine rebooted, everything seems fine, the browser looks like it was rolled back to just when I installed the plugins, taking me to the plugins ‘getting started’ pages. I also noted that the icon for that suspicious application didn’t show up in the taskbar during startup.
So I guess it was a piece of mal/spyware? It must be something new to get past all the safeguards I had. Should I report the file that I got to one of those virus databases?