Like you,
DoctorOhh, I've been in this business for a long time. I've written 30+ books on operating systems, from DOS to OS2 to UNIX to Windows. And while I've been personally lucky about getting infested, I've had to work on machines that did get infested. Some appeared clean, some didn't. But I would never trust one again after it had an infection.
Pretending that all is well, or even that your "techie" friend can solve it is just being an ostrich. And the costs can be
serious for you. And your friends/family.
I'll make a suggestion for your future endeavors -- when you wipe your PC, rebuild it with a second partition or full second HDD. Put all your data (My Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) on that second HDD or partition. (I like to assign the D: drive to it, and label it "Data".) Change the settings for your user account to store documents, pictures, music and video on that second drive. And change your account logon to a standard user account. If you really need admin priviliges, use a second logon for when you need to be an administrator.
If you want a referral for cloud storage that integrates directly with Windows, use this
link to OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) that will give you 5.5GB of free storage to put documents, etc. on. I've switched to using it for a lot of things and am quite pleased with it.