I've had a bad day...wages of sin & all that

Can anyone help with the identity of a nasty bout of cyberclap that I contracted today?

It was my own fault of course. Lots of work to do on the laptop; lots of documents to produce. I needed to pdf some scans and I could have spent a few quid on Easypdf to get rid of the logo, but I thought I'd be smart and use a dodgy copy of Acrobat writer 6.

Took no chances; fully patched copy of XP Pro and up-to-date McAfee. Scanned the program before installation - no problem. Huh; Vengance is mine saith the Lord.

I knew I was in trouble after the install when McAfee fell over. Couldn't bring it back to life. Then IE died as well, but I could see traffic on the LAN...
Tried to remove the hard drive to scan in the desktop, but found an odd connector on it - I had no adaptor to fit. Took a chance (another one) and got the laptop drive shared on the LAN, but the licensed copy of McAfee was on the laptop - the desktop runs AVG free which won't scan remote drives.

Tried to install AVG on the laptop. It seemed to install, but it wouldn't run. Made several attempts of course. Then tried Stinger; died at the same files every time, so I deleted them & tried again. It died at a different set of files.

Tried a System Restore, but the crafty little bugger had erased all of the restore points, except for a new one it had created immediately after its own installation.

Eventually I gave up and reinstalled from the last backup. No permanent damage, but a day completely wasted.

I then had to get on to Spamhaus; remember that network activity? The little bugger had got me blacklisted within 30 minutes of installation.

All sorted now thank goodness and a painful lesson well learnt. Any idea what flavour of nasty I might have caught?