With new viruses being released every day, there's no way for all cleaning tools to be 100% effective. Anti-virus and anti-spyware developers create 'definitions' or look for 'patterns' to remove current & old threats, but there's no way to know if you're infected with something new.
The only way to be 100% clean is to stay off the internet. Although that's not a realistic choice.
Use safe practices when using the internet:
Don't open suspicious emails, don't use Peer-to-Peer or bittorrent programs for downloading, don't click on ads that say "click here to win 2 free ipods", don't run free anti-virus scans unless you know that the site is legitimate, etc...
You might want to set yourself up with a good backup & restore strategy.
After reformatting & installing all programs, service packs, drivers, updates, etc...
You can create a Disk Image or Partition Backup using tools like Norton Ghost, Maxblast 5 from maxtor - you may need a maxtor drive installed for maxblast to work since it may look for an existing maxtor drive to run. Other hard drive manufacturers offer similiar tools.
Use the tools to create a bootable CD & create a partition backup image and save it to an external USB hard drive. Test the CD to make sure it's bootable and that you have access to your usb drive.
If your system becomes infected, you can boot from CD & put the image back on your C: drive. Remeber that you'll lose all new data when you restore, but you won't have to re-install Windows, drivers, and other programs which can save you a lot of time.
Creating and restoring partition images can take time, so you might want another type of backup for your data, documents, pictures, music, etc...
Hope that helps.
Zyldar
