Hi, Did you use adw cleaner, a reputed free ware.
From the goings, i suspect your computer is infested with recycle virus, which will recreate the folders and make all the folders as short cut. But , the adw cleaner or junkware removal tool by thisusu.org in his site, would do well to remove. The virus is not attacking your pc, buy annoying with popups and its evil design of recreation.
I would recommend that you do the scan with these in safe mode. AS for av programs, some programs delete some virus, which others would not. Why cannot you trust mse tool, which is updated each day.
Tossing away hardware is serious, for that you could destroy the hdd totally.