Sorry Simon.
Would formatting wipe everything??
No need to apologise.
It's just that with this sort of problem, you could be going round in circles for ages, as some spyware makes itself extremely difficult to remove, and at the end of the day, if you backup your data, format, and reinstall Windows, you should end up with a nice clean system, which will run faster too.
Just follow the instructions, but make sure you
back up all your important data first, including address books, bookmarks / favourites, as well as your music / pictures / documents, and also be sure that you have driver CDs for any hardware that needs them.