While it is important to have an anti-spyware tool installed to help protect your computer from infection, some malware can be troublesome to detect. HiJackThis is a system analysis tool that can be used to check your registry and important file settings and provides you with a detailed list of services, browser helper object, startup items and much more.

The program then provides you with the option of looking up information about any of the entries that have been found to enable you to determine whether it is malicious or not. HiJackThis will not automatically indicate whether a particular entry is malware, but it provides you will all of the information you need to diagnose problems yourself.

Anything you find which you feel should not be present can be deleted, but the program should be used with caution. While you are able to look up information about everything that has been detected on your system, a better option may be to ask an expert to take a look at the log files that have been generated.

There are a variety of online forums which can be used to post HiJackThis logs and others will be able to analyse the entries it contains. This is an undeniably powerful tool and can be used to fix problem that dedicated spyware removal tools are simply not able to touch.

Please note HijackThis originated from Trend Micro and is now in the public domain as of v2.5.