My brush with Conduit was very brief about six monts ago. I was getting CPUID but their web site has a bunch of flaky ads with misleading download buttons and I accidentally downloades something that had Conduit on it. I instantly noticed that it hijacked the search engine in IE and was popping up gratuitous ads and stripped it out of IE. I didn't see it in Firefox. The files have been dormant since then, but the malware utilities have been finding them with their scans.
I have not had problems with malware on this computer, other than that brief brush with Conduit, which lasted perhaps ten minutes. I hurried because I was afraid that it would download more stuff. I have never had a virus or worm on this computer.
Norton 360 has never found anything on this coputer except tracking cookies, but I run QuickScan often to keep those down.
NPE has never found anything except false alarms for a PowerDesk DLL and aag.exe, the Ascii Art Generator program. This last time, this week, it found a regsitry entry for Explorer called "HideIcon" that I let it quarantine.
But, once, while doing part-time teaching at a nearby University, a Professor Emeritus came in and bumped me from the usual office and they gave me an old vacant office to use while he was there - and it had an old 286 computer that was eaten up with adware, mostly from 180 Solutions. I used Malwarebytes free downloads and other stuff then. It was like a video game, cleaning that stuff out every morning. You guys are pretty well versed in adware; I just now refreshed myself with Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180_Solutions.
But I do find it interesting how many places that conduit.com put stuff, the fact that uninstall failed - apparently by design, that there were several exe files laying around that probably would have re-installed it, and that it picked out a random applicaiton that has nothing to do with search or toolbars, SynchCell, to mingle its files with.