I’ve heard good things about VIPRE but haven’t had a chance to test it myself. Definitely let us know how it goes.
The method that worked for me (I just did one of these on Monday) was to disable the driver, pull the power on the system, boot into safe mode, disable again, pull the power again, then boot back to safe mode. At this point, MBAM, Spybot, and Avira were able to run, and they knocked it out.
I don’t know if you were letting the system shut down, I assume you were. That’s a big mistake. Letting it go through logoff tasks means that the nasties get to renable stuff that you’ve disabled as the system powers down.
I had something on a machine a week or two ago that wouldn’t let anything run. MBAW and hijackthis would just die without loading up, etc. Turned out it was a rootkit on the machine - which belonged to a coworker’s college kid. That machine was pwnt utterly.
What I ended up doing finally was running avg’s old anti-rootkit, because it fires up with a random process name and rootkits that look for certain process names to prevent you running cleaners can’t stop it. Once I had that thing dead, I could remove the 300 or so other agents.