HELP - Tiny Insects Eating My Plants

Just trying my hand at house plants for this winter. Got some pots good potting mix, bought plants.
Im Set, right? Wrong!

The plants are browning / dying and I see VERY tiny little insects! they crawl and can fly some. I can barely see them, too tiny for me to figure how to do pics to share.

When i press the soil they seem to be eating the roots - there is space beneath the plant! (I potted all well, no air pockets.)

Your advice is urgently needed. These tiny things are killing my new winters venture: house plants.

Found this article: http://tinyurl.com/mdr6yq Or
http://homeideas.howstuffworks.com/insects-pests/homemade-insecticide-with-garlic.htm

Could this work??

advice appreciated thanks

I just responded to your post in the other forum--might help if you could post this additional info about the bugs over there too in case someone has some additional ideas. I still have a suspicion they might be fungus gnats, in which case overwatering your plant is probably the primary source of its distress. The adults don't hurt plants, but the larvae can damage roots. However, overwatering will usually kill the plant first before the gnat larvae do so enough damage to kill the plant, so the first thing I would do is check on your watering and correct it (best thing to do is stick your finger down a few inches into the pot before the next time you were going to water and see how wet it feels). To get rid of the gnats, you can put up yellow sticky traps to catch the adults, and to get rid of the larvae in the soil you can use a product with Bacillus thuringiensis in it (mosquito dunks and Gnatrol are two products with Bt but there are probably others as well).

It's very unlikely that the space you're seeing under the plant has anything to do with insects. As you water, the potting mix will compact some so even if you didn't see air pockets when you first repotted there could be some now, or if you had a lot of easily rotted organic material in your potting mix that can break down quickly and have a similar effect.

This isn't going to be of much help to you, but if you use coconut coir instead of peat in your mix, you will not get fungus gnats. For some reason they don't like coir.

Fungus Gnat adults are attracted to the color yellow. if you put dishes of water with some dish soap in it and use yellow containers scattered amongst your plants - the adult gnats will gladly drown themselves for you :)

If your tiny bugs are cigar shaped, they are thrips - but this is unlikely because thrips like to eat pollen and most houseplants don't have flowers.