I regularly use both AdAware and Spybot to get rid of the sneaky ads and stuff that climb into my hard drive and stay there until I run these programs to get rid of them.
I run them both fairly regularly, but one thing I have noticed is that is is always the “usual suspects” that show up. It is almost always the same sneaky things popping up again and again.
Certainly there must be some way to ensure they don’t keep coming back onto my hard drive - or isn’t there?
I am not talking pop up blockers - I mean a way to stop those little trackers from coming back onto my computer.
Dunno what are usual suspects in your case, but in my experience some detections (actually usually all of them) in SpyBot are simply tracking cookies, that are created every time I visit some common webpages. Nothing really dangerous.
Only way to stop them is to block cookies at all (not very useful IMO) or make some exception rules (which is too much bother for me). I can live with 'em.
The usual suspects for me tend to be stuff like cookies for banner ads - ad.doubleclick.net or some such.
One way to stop them would be to edit your HOSTS file so that the offending domain points to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) - this would have the consequence that banners deriving from that domain simply wouldn’t work at all.
A decent ad-blocking extension for your browser would probably achieve the same result, only more efficiently and pre-emptively, at the same time as probably also leaving web pages looking less ‘broken’.