 Oh man, I can't think of anything that would drive me bonkers faster than the situation you're describing, honestly. If there's one thing that drives me crazy about working within the Windows environment, it's how there are thousands of sites lurking, poised, ready to infect my computer, and once infected, tons of different spyware programs to ruin my computing experience.
First off, though, let's define spyware. Spyware is any software that's actually running on your computer without you explicitly granting it permission, installing it or wanting it there. Most typically, spyware tracks what you're doing and reports salient data to a remote server, for example capturing keystrokes and trying to report email addresses or credit card numbers. Very bad stuff!
Some spyware does the opposite, though, just acting as a conduit for third parties to drop information on your computer, and I think that's what you're seeing with these online advertisements showing up on your desktop. This category of spyware is called adware, by the way, but it's still the same insidious type of program running without permission on your computer.
First off, the single most popular solution to avoiding spyware is LavaSoft's Ad-Aware. This is a great little program that you install and then it promptly scares the daylights out of you by reporting all this spyware that's probably already running on your computer without you knowing. Zap everything, then you'll be able to run your Windows system with just a bit more safety and comfort. Ad-Aware is what I run on my WinXP computers.
Microsoft has also been putting considerable effort into figuring out how to eradicate spyware from Windows XP computers, and while it's rumored that the upcoming Windows Vista will have a much smarter backend to minimize the risk of spyware, in the meantime it's worth checking out Windows AntiSpyware. However, this application is still in "beta" so there's a slight chance it'll do something bad to your computer, I suppose. My experience is that Microsoft doesn't release something into beta until it's pretty darn stable, so unless you have an exceptional or unusual configuration, you're probably a perfect customer for this application.
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