Tech support failure

I stayed up until one this morning trying to fix Tommy's computer and worked on it more this evening but couldn't de-malware it. It had a corrupted rootkit, which from what I read online, is extremely difficult to be rid of, once you're infected, short of wiping the hard drive and starting from scratch.

If you know of a super-easy, guaranteed way to get rid of an infection by rootkit, please don't tell me because we decided rather than try to System Recovery his old XP desktop to go to Best Buy and get a new one. It's all very shiny and new and Windows 7, and I'm quite jealous sitting over here with my old-hat Vista machine. But it's better than trying to share when we both want to be online at once, which is what we do most evenings: he at his desktop and I at my laptop, both browsing.

(I need a new label: "where the money goes." :P )