I'm reading it, but I'm not the important one--'cause I don't work for
Microsoft.
I don't know the mechanisms that they have in place to gather and make use
of the feedback they are getting here, but I believe these messages are read
and the feedback is used.
The safe mode issue seems obvious to me--in fact, so obvious, that perhaps
it is a bug--otherwise surely they'd have had some form of notification to
the user that this is needed--I don't know how long Giant's product was out,
but a good while--and the reviewers didn't mention needing this procedure.
I don't think I started the scan twice recommendation, but I'll plead guilty
to parroting it. As I mentioned--it is my practice when cleaning viruses,
and I don't think it is too unreasonable a practice--it is nice to be sure
that the machine comes through clean when you think you are done.
I just read the "start in safe mode" instructions in help, and they don't
seem too tough--the machine sits at the list of OS's for some period of
time--the default is 30 seconds. I reduce that to 7 seconds on mine. If
you've reduced it to a low value, this is the price that you pay.
Here's a question for you--in regards to the expert handholding stuff. The
goal of Microsoft Antispyware is to do the job on its own. However, there
are always going to be bugs that it cannot handle at the current definition
level, and perhaps not without new code. So the expert assistance stuff
will continue to be around I think. We've floated the idea of an additional
newsgroup in this group for such cleaning dialogs, but I don't recall that I
got much response--it was part of a thread, not a general announcement or
poll.
What about the tools available within the product to be used in the context
of expert help? We don't have HijackThis, but the system explorers should
be able to see the same items. What needs to be done with the current tools
within the product to make them more easily used for cleaning with expert
assistance? The kinds of things I can think of are:
Let you cut and paste the left pane--i.e. all the startup items including
full detail, rather than just the detail of the highlighted single item.
Number those items in some repeatable way, so that they can be posted, and
an expert can say--block 6,7 and 9--and those numbers will correspond
repeatably on the next run of the system explorers.