I am not responsible for what you do with this information. If you decide to follow these instructions to remove your spyware background you may do so at your own risk.

You probably have been surfing the net unprotected from all the marketing scams and spyware and have noticed that your OS is starting to act slow and have settings changed that you cannot change back. This small readme is aimed at getting rid of the annoying spyware background that says your infected with spyware. This background when changed will just change back once you reboot.

Intermediate to advanced users. This fix has been used and tested only on Windows XP machines. This fix does not apply to *nix systems.

After searching, it seems to be a policy issue. Either find the appropriate option in Windows and change it back, or try it the manual way. I have been successful using the manual registry editing method.

1. Start Regedit by going to start->run and typing regedit in the text box.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. Delete the "Wallpaper.htm" entry
4. Reboot your system and set wallpaper to whatever you want. You should be able to change the wallpaper and not have that annoying background anymore.

If you do not want to follow the steps of the Manual method which is preferred and may be safer then you can download my exported registry entry which should get applied to your registry upon execution.

A few popular automated spyware removal programs are Hijackthis, Adware, SpySweeper, and more. Just use your favorite search engine and you'll find plenty.