Gmail account generating emails. Hacked?

Something's up with my gmail account. I am getting messages saying that emails sent by me are bouncing back. Funny thing... I'm not sending emails to these people. I don't want to be one of those ghost email accounts that it appears I am becoming. I need to keep this account as it is used for some job purposes. How do I douche it?

I read this thread: http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/s...ighlight=virus
and installed and ran AVG and Ad-Aware and got rid of a few things but a group of emails still got sent out today.

a spammer is using your email address (probably randomly) as the "From" in some of the messages they send. nothing to worry about (you should look at the message quoted in the "return" email to ensure that it's spam) it happens all the time. if you post your email anywhere on the web chances are it will be harvested by spammers within the first day :)

To be safe, you can change the password (in case someone really is sending messages with the account) however, more likely is someone is spoofing the address and sending out messages from some other account with your address as the from. You are most likely getting the non-deliverable notices and bounced message replies. Take a look at the headers and see if there are any clues as to the origin. If they are all the same IP address you can look up to see who owns that IP and try reporting the info. Otherwise, you may have to try and filter these or attempt to send them to spam so they slowing quit ending up in your in box.