Well, I helped a client get their website back from being redirected to a microsoft scam website. Even though the restoring process was a nightmare, it feels good to get things working like it was suppose to :)

How did you end up cleaning it up, as it did sound like a crater from last rant

@JoshBent well luckily there was a working version of the site in that temp directory, so I backed up the db and that directory, then nuked the root directory of the server. Restored the web root, restored the db, connected the db via config.php, changed the home and site paths in the wp options table, used search and replace to change all the old url paths to the new path (which was thousands of url links.. thank god for that plugin) and that was pretty much it. Had to make a few tweaks on this version of the site but it got resolved :)

@konicm8ker well done! just check the cleaned version for some of those urls though, he might have used some pirated themes/plugins, which almost always have some sort of remote in them