Spam filter settings allowing spam through in both Standard and Exclusive mode.

I am helping a family member with some hotmail issues they are having. We seem to be at a loss as to why they are currently receiving in excess of 100 spam emails per day. This has only occurred since a seemingly random browser crash late last week during their use of hotmail. When they restarted IE, they were prompted to sign back into their account which is not usual (passwords are usually saved in the browser cookies) and were shown a screen which insisted that they agree to allowing suggested contacts - this rings alarm bells with me as I cannot imagine MS would insist on this.

So far, we have done the following:

- reset the spam filter to Standard (it was on Exclusive) - this had no effect

- reset the spam filter to Exclusive to attempt a 'forced' resetting back to just safe senders - this had no effect

- manually edited their whole safe senders list, deleting any email that was not currently in their regular contacts - this had no effect

- manually blocked every spam email address (and then blocked them again from the junk folder) - this makes little difference as each new email is subtly different, but it is advised on other posts.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.