It is with this in mind that I'm suggesting you pick up a free program called Ad Aware. It installs easily into your programs files and never bothers you until you call it up to do it's thing. It's thing is that it scans your entire hard drive for everything from bad cookies to full spyware packets, (trojan horses). Then you just click the continue buttons to check off the offending programs and Ad Aware will remove these little horrors SAFELY from your system. And no matter how computer smart you may be, I'm betting you'll find you have more of these privacy invading offenders than you ever thought you had.
To obtain a free download of Ad Aware: click here, scroll down to "download page" and download the newest version.