Your thoughts on anti-spyware.

I wanted to see what people were using these days. For me, it's getting a bit ridiculous. I'm running, Ad-Aware, Spybot, Spy Sweeper, and Norton Antivirus AT THE SAME TIME, which I've decided is dumb.

It seems to me that Ad-AWare and Spybot have really fallen down on the job lately and Spy Sweeper seems to have taked the lead, so I'm thinking of running just the first two.

Any suggestions?

I run Ad-aware only which sometimes fails to clean things up. However, I can usually manually clean anything out that it fails to take care of. I also use Norton Anti-virus and Zonealarm. Zonealarm will alert me if any rogue program tries to make an outbound connection from my PC.

Here's a good site: http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/

Point your browser there. It will automatically check your system for browser-based parasites - especially those that plague IE.

My home network is behind my router which has NAT, and then on my individual PCs I have Zone Alarm Pro 3.0 on two of them, and I currently have Sygate Personal Firewall Pro 5.5 running on another that I'm testing out. If it continues to work well, I plan to use it on the other PCs that currently have the older version of ZAP loaded.

My anti-virus is Norton and as far as 'spyware', I run Spybot S&D on all my PCs.

http://www.spy-buster.com/

a friend of mine's company produces this.. it has spy watch, a nifty little feature if you ask me.

Beyond the firewall and antivirus stuff I run Ad-Aware and Spybot as necessary. I also ruthlessly patch all my software.