Nod hanging around like a bad smell

Ok. I tried NOD32 out once and never removed it from my computer. I basically forgot about it as I have a few anti-malware programs. This morning I tried to use the internet and neither firefox or IE would load pages... they went straight to windows update (on both firefox and IE). I fiddled around a bit (can't remember what I did unfortunately) and tried again... this time it comes up with some error on a white screen (can't remember the exact message but it mentioned something about a home/home directory) regarding nod32. Great! So I "uninstall" nod from its uninstall file in the ESET folder (as I read that doing it through add/remove programs won't work if it's already playing up). All that did was remove the uninstall file. What is the point of that? By the way, when I said I fiddled around, I did not touch any registry settings.

Getting more frustrated, I tried to do it from add/remove programs. It just hung.. I'm assuming that's because it couldn't find the uninstall file that nod had conveniently deleted! I restart the computer and once it has loaded, go straight to task manager and end ekrn.exe. For once (in the past I saw ekrn taking up heaps of memory so tried to end it and it didn't go away) it went away and so I went straight to C:\Program Files\ESET and deleted everything including the folder itself. I also went into the registry after finding out what registry settings to delete and deleted them. I open firefox (my home page is google) and google comes up in the address bar... but wait! There's http://www.eset.com/index.php! Oh wow they even changed my home page for me, great! I think we're reached the pinnacle of defiant behaviour from a commercial anti-malware program.

1) Why does ekrn.exe not die when you tell it to die?
2) Why does the uninstaller uninstall the uninstaller and nothing else?
3) Why is eset.com loading instead of my home page?
4) Why is there no support for a clean removal tool for getting rid of nod?

 

I uninstall NOD every time I do a clean install of the next new version. I can't figure out what you've got there.