MS: I have to admit that I'm really not much of a software person. Hardware I know really well (processors, disk drives, RAM, etc. etc.), but software is totally arbitrary and often nonsensical. So I'm the rare computer person who hates software - to the point where I almost refuse to follow it.

Having said that, the two programs people seem to use for this sort of thing are AdAware and Hijack This. I've used AdAware. It scans your computer for files and hacks installed by websites w/o permission. It then generates a list of those files, and you can choose which ones to delete. I think that thread was listing all the files that you have to delete from the list generated by AdAware or HT in order to solve the problem.

And again, you don't have to pay for AdAware. As a home user, you can DL it for free from Lavasoft.