Ad-aware will soon update to a whole new application --

That's good news. Thanks. I'll be keeping an eye out for that one.

Yea, I hope they add a way to get rid of FlashTrack without having to do all that crap and rebooting.

Not to be violent or anything. But I would like to find the creators of the spyware and beat their freaking heads in. *Politely*

The best program is Spy Blocker.

Reason being it stops spyware from every getting to your PC. Unlike adaware that lets it in and then says here it is let's remove it.

http://www.spyblocker-software.com/spyblocker/

I'm perfectly happy with Spybot S&D, myself. SpyBlocker sounds like a great idea too - but the -last- thing I need is another program running resident.

Great news

I'm with you kthx, when my systray starts to be longer than my taskbar, it's time to do some cleanup.

Actually, I only run adaware when I am suspicious... when I was new to the Internet, and I first ran adaware I found 147 different instances of spyware. Now I go months and don't run it. If I think I notice slowing, I open it. Sometimes I just run it because it has been a few months. Usually all I find are cookies, unless it was a time when I was really suspicious. Then I find folders.

Adaware has a free version; Spyblocker isn't. I, too, am trying to reduce stuff in my startup and taskbar.

I think that one thing that has been of great benifit was when I imported source files (I think that what they are called). They are not a program at all. I never usually see ads, popups don't happen....

It's actually gotten worse for me with Windows XP, Paxx - now that I can set certain icons to never show up on my taskbar! When it starts getting too big, it's only /all/ to easy to go in there and set icons of things I want loaded, but never actively use (or at least use the icon for - like my touchpad software,) to 'never show'.

without a doubt MS Windows intergration of the net into the OS made leaps and bounds with XP.

.NET should be a blast !

kthx: I hear you. I actually have my systray set up to NOT hide any icons, because I want to see when I'm getting too much stuff there.

I run Startup-Orginizer which actually gives me the ability to turn off TSR's and such or out-right remove them from starting at boot up, be it a registry-key, program, script, what have you...

Seems like everything wants to hit the tray and I hate it when I get the 16bit sub-system out of resources error too.

32 bit OS, 1.25 gig ram 100 gig free space and the 16bit sub-system is running or has run out of memory? , and they claim that there is no DOS code just emulation in Windows XP !!!!

i don't run spyblocker or adaware any longer and surprised that spyblocker is no longer free.

eventually I guess there will be no more freeware.

Perhaps if ad blocking software wasn't available more companies would be offering free programs and relying on ads to pay the bills.