Okay. So the execution didn't go perfectly. I got infected by this really stubborn hijacker/fake antispyware site called antivirgear (no relation to the excellent plain antivir which I use on a regular basis). I tried my usual antispyware scans. They detected it in both cases and supposedly removed it in both cases...but didn't. Usually Spybot and Adaware are reliable and work but this stuff was particularly stubborn! After all, I ran these scans AFTER a supposed uninstall of Antivirgear. (Those liars!) I looked for a while to find a cleaner/remover online and stumbled across SmitFraudFix.

Followed the instructions. A little quirky and the final part of cleaning the registry supposedly failed. Some sort of warning saying unable to access registry or whatever, but IT WORKED! Upond reboot, not only did was it no longer hijacking my page from my default real home page to the bogus antivirgear site, it returned it to the original state with MSN as the homepage, just like an entire system clean reinstall!
Practically returned it to a virgin state.

This stuff works! If your problem can't be solved by your regular anti spyware software and the threat happens to be on SmitFraudFix's list of target problems, it will work.

Good luck to all who use it. I'm a believer! And it's FREEware! Excellent!