Not Ranked
I do this for a living (better than 19 years). Trust me, if you screw something up in the registry, you're going to end up paying somebody to get things right.
Also, every time you reboot and successfully reload the OS, the registry is overwritten, so very rarely can you go back and restore a previous "good" version. I think it safe to assume, that your (let's call it) your "backup copy" of the registry is already boogered up.
With regards to Ad-aware, I did specify the latest build 6.0.1.181. Previous builds/versions are no longer being updated. The most recent signature update now is dated 5/8/2004. Spybot's signature file is more than 2 months old (3/4/04).
Let Ron walk you through running the program it you feel any aprehension about going it alone. It's free and won't damage anything. It will remove the offending registry keys, hijackers, tracking and data mining cookies. If there are rogue processes running, you will be asked to allow Ad-aware to run again at startup.
Perhaps now would be a good time to back up any important stuff you have on your system.
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