After running Adaware, Spybot, Xcleaner, Norton AV, and a Panda scan, and still having the problem, I downloaded Spyware Doctor. It found lots of things, and installed a few of it's own... namely a bunch of naughty shortcuts to my desktop. Also, it would scan, but unless I paid, it wouldn't remove the files. So I went with Spy Sweeper. (those choices were before I read the recommendations here
) Spy Sweeper found 85 items (programs and cookies) and almost 600 traces of programs. It was able to clean out all but one trace item. I now no longer have a problem with hotsearchbar, or any other nasty little program that I can tell. I'm running spy sweeper again, after defragging, running scandisk and rebooting. Just to make sure I have everything gone.
Thanks for all of the suggestions.