Removing Encoded Footer Links

I’ve spent the past several hours trying to find a way to circumvent the malicious (eval) code that some designers put in their templates.

I have no problem crediting the designers, but I need to remove the potentially dangerous codes.

The typical “wrap footer_starts_here” in the index and replacing the footer.php file is NOT working in the least. I did “decode” and it is exactly what the warning message states when removing the footer links.
My template has the (eval) code in multiple files- header, home, etc.
Removed all that I could find, and still get the site bounced to a preset warning by the designer about removing footer links.
The “TAC” plug-in didn’t even detect the malicious code.

I really need this template and spent weeks working on it.

Is there ANY definitive way to remove all instances of the malicious code while maintaining a working template?