[benjie]

Gosh, Ad-Aware and SpyBot - I have used both in the past until one great and lovely day 3 wonderful months ago....I have 2 17" Vista laptops, both are high end. The oldest one is an Acer and I purchased it almost immediately upon the arrival of Vista. The Acer is quick, but it sure did not like adding new hardware via the USB - got tired of it and purchased a Gateway. The youngest son downloaded a tune on the Acer (the router no longer allows the sites he was visiting) and got a trojan. The trojan was not really harmful, but sure was persistent. After 2 days of deleting it and it coming back and working with the 2 above applications and one other, I gave another application a try - PcTools Spyware Doctor and wow, it zapped that trojan on the first try.

I purchased a second copy and it now runs on both Vista laptops. I use Spybot to lock the preferences, and did so before the trojan came on board - but it did not work and as I mentioned, after working for 2 days with the other 2 applications and manually working on the registery, I decided that I needed to continue looking.