Yes, I read the computer sticky first, and the Spybot faq. No help there. And I ran Adaware, my Norton antivirus stuff, and CWshredder. Security task manager finds nothing out of sorts. I even uninstalled and reinstalled Spybot. And I’m still stuck.
I run the scan, and about 2/3 of the way thru, it locks up. Stops at Bot-check (2957/5835: C2.lop) and hasn’t progressed in 24 hours. It has stopped at this same point in the last 3 attempts to run it. The program can be minimized, and other buttons are active, except I can’t close the program, except by using the task manager. Rebooting changes nothing.
I second fireman. It sounds very much like some of you are running a very old version of Spybot, one that hasn’t had any file updates in a long, long time. These kinds of tools are of little use if you don’t keep them up-to-date.
You should be running Spybot version 1.3, and the latest detection updates should be dated 2004-10-14.
Well, that’s interesting. Because I’ve had my spybot search for updates periodically (including again 2 minutes ago) and it reports there are no updates. I’m running version 1.2 too. Guess I should uninstall and redownload.
The older version (1.2) can’t use the newest file updates, so when you tell it to look for file updates, it says there aren’t any. What you need is the newest version of the engine, version 1.3. That’s the only version for which file updates are now being made available.
I had the same problem with Spybot. I also naively assumed that checking for updates would also inform you about updates to the engine. Silly me.
Uninstalling and redownloading the new version did the trick for me. (Actually, what really seems to be doing the trick is running Ad-Aware as well.)
I’m just taking heart that my spyware problem doesn’t seem to be quite as bad as Cecil’s. Ad-Aware only found 300-something things today. Where the hell does all this crap come from? But, my system is finally running at a seemingly normal speed for the first time in months knock on wood. And my IE-loving sister-in-law should have no reason to touch this machine ever again, so perhaps we can keep it this way.
Yeah, I only stumbled on it by accident. AdAware does a better job of letting you know when there’s a complete new version available, and steering to the download site. But, hey, it’s tough to do too much bitching about free stuff!