Opinions of SpySweeper Program

I have several different programs installed (including SpyBot and MS Antispyware), but consider SpySweeper my first line of defense. Upon installation it updates your hosts file to block a decent sized list of sites known to peddle spyware. From then on it actively monitors all changes to the system, including your hosts file, IE settings (sorry, no Firefox/Netscape/Opera support yet), startup items, and BHOs, and does not put much of a dent in system resources. (No noticable effect on system performance of my primary system (see profile) during active scanning, though during a full system scan there is a bit of a slowdown.)

Performance-wise, I put it through a few tests and it came out smelling like a rose, catching everything SpyBot and MS Antispyware did, and then some. After enabling all scanning options, it found several keyloggers, two trojan horses (it's apparently in competition with antivirus software, to some degree), one rootkit (a new feature), and over a dozen malware-laden System Restore files that the others missed on my test computer. (I had downloaded quite a bit of junk over the previous couple of days just for this occasion.) You can set it to run in the background on a set schedule, sweeping active memory, the registry, cookies, compressed and restricted files, and all accounts/partitions/drives. I have it set to perform a full system scan of my primary system every other day and it usually takes just over an hour to scan 120GB of files (spread across 2 160GB drives).

Hope the review of a fellow newbie helps.
John

better at trojans than say EwidoSS is, but it's not rogue, nor known to be particularly problimatical and THAT price is RIGHT!! I'm going to try and get one (if they're not all gone already)!! Thanks for the tip! Merry X-mas & Happy New Year.