As for the original question of is spyware a virus....
Spyware is a bit of a misnomer for all of this....spyware refers to things like gator which specifically leech your personal info for marketing purposes and phone it home. Something like Hooper's toolbar is not really spyware per se, just grouped with it because of it's scummy tendancies. Let's call them scumware.
Is it a virus?
How do you define a virus? If you define a virus as something that arrives on your machine unexpectedly without you asking for it or agreeing to it, and makes your machine behave in a manner that you do not wish or desire, then certainly anything that autoinstalls without so much as clicking a T&C would be considered a virus.
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