New Spybot S&D Fails for Me

I’ve used Spybot since version 1.2 and was pleased to see 1.5 come out 9/3/07. I grabbed a copy last week, removed version 1.4 and installed 1.5 on my Windows 2000 box. That’s when the fun began. I had to jack with it and reboot several times before Windows would run. I discovered they had pumped my hosts file up to 187k bytes — a really bad idea. My browsers began to crawl. Trying to list every potentially dangerous URL is ridiculous anyway. I restored my hosts file to it’s original state and the browsers began moving again without impacting the apparent functioning of Spybot. I then installed the program on a box with XP Home (a Toshiba notebook, but a Micro$oft virgin). This was worse. It tried to immunize the browser (IE7), moving the progress bar to the 100% setting, and hanged. I downloaded a fresh copy and tried again. No joy. I removed the software. I wrote this all up in a trouble ticket and submitted it on their web site. They finally came back to me today with comments completely unrelated to my own. “Perhaps you are using an older version of Spybot.”   hello!?   The trouble ticket creation form includes questions about the hardware and version numbers — did you not pay attention to your own ticket!? They made other completely irrelevant statements and gave me nothing useful. Grrrr… I hope they get this sorted out quickly, but I’m afraid my confidence is shaken. SpywareBlaster (signature based) will immunize IE7 and Firefox while WinPatrol 2007 (rules based) provides real-time monitoring of your registry and hosts file. If anyone has compared these products, I’d like to see your comments. [Updated 10/08/07]   Spybot support informs me that the immunization feature works only with the Micro$oft browser, and that they have “issues” with IE7.