A friend has a nine-year old PC which has been upgraded to Windows 98. Her ISP is BellSouth.NET using DSL. She keeps the old machine mostly for sentimental value. It has a lot of spyware and adware, mostly downloaded by two nine-year old boys who formerly played with it. I plan to use Ultra Win Cleaner or SpyBot S&D to remove most of this garbage.
The problem is that the computer does something really strange. Namely, the windows are "shuttered". That is, on say a Windows Explorer screen for drive C:\, you see the toolbars but not the list of file descriptions. You just see a blank rectangle.
I discovered quite by accident that you can restore the file list by right clicking in the list area. Then a box appears with one word, "cancel". Click the cancel box, and the list of files reappears. A similar situation occurs on internet windows - you see the tool bars but no content - until you go thru the left click and right click.
Her malicious or questionable programs include Internet Alert, Virtual Bouncer, SAVE.EXE and WEATHER.EXE. I have read up on these programs and found nothing like the problem described above. Any ideas?

off the cuff I'd say re-format the drive and start fresh...write the connection info down