I haven’t been here for awhile and was surprised this thread had continued !
I suppose Microsoft security issues will always have an perpetual dynamic.
Just to add a bit of fuel to the collection of Data by M$ idea mentioned by P3t3rb0nn :
I’ve been trying to clean a friends computer, it’s using XP home. Has a damn preinstall of XP (NEC) , and basically the thing is unstable. Because of the NEC factory pre-install it seems you have to basically format the computer if things go wrong, as the XP disk which came with the Comp. is just a recovery disk, which will re-install XP from a HDD partition.
Any way after talking to NEC :
and finding this trap, I rang a technician at Microsoft to try to figure if there was an alternative. I could buy a XP cd and extract what I needed , as some applications aren’t working; OR he said they’d be more than happy to help me fix what we ascertained as a SPY/malware problem. There’s some entries in the Device Manager, which are not hardware , but are pretending to be ???.
I was pretty amazed how persistent he was to help with curing this nasty infection and offering the services of a 1st grade technician.I believe they are collecting info. about Spy/Malware, which is a good thing, and this comp. certainly is under the control of a sophisticated virus.
It was picked up by my friends teenager who uses P2P programs , and game emulaters.
The software for the M.A.M.E. emulator has established itself as Hardware ; and there’s a “logical Disk Manager Administrative Service” & “Windows User Mode Driver Framework” entry also. These are listed with ? & ! as unknown devices 
Any wasys, if I dont have to Format I’ll be happy !
So on Monday will be analysing the system with a bigtime M$ tech. They use HiJackThis logs as their major tool. Aint that funny that a free program is the Major tool of this billion dollar company. And the logs are worth there weight in gold to them I bet ;D
Funny old world idn’t it !!! 