Phil Clegg said:
I run PestPatrol immediately after running MS AntiSpy and
find a dozen or so spyware intruders that were mmissed.
Both systems were updated each time.
PestPatrol is known to issue false positives. Several months when I
tested, PestPatrol reported that I had the Bonz[a]iBuddy pest so I
followed through all their manual eradication instructions but nothing
of what they described was found on my system. Yesterday it reported
that I had the IstBar pest but it false triggered on an old mciwndx.ocx
ActiveX/OLE control that is part of the Microsoft VisualBasic v5
redistributable runtime library that many products include in their
install or required (some still proliferate the old VB5 runtime instead
of the newer VB6 runtime which, I believe, no longer includes that OLE
module). So PestPatrol triggered on just the filename rather than
looking at the contents of the file or was triggering on a file that is
part of another product or provides support for many products of which
the pest may also make use of (but then the pest also makes use of the
Win32 API for it to run). It also alerted on URLs to anonymizer.com in
my Favorites folder (which I occasionally use to anonymously and more
protectively visit unknown sites, like those listed in newsgroups) and
for the URL shortcut in my Favorites to experts-exhange.com which
operates a forum where you can get help (or offer it).
Be leery of alerts from PestPatrol since too many times they are bogus.
These false positives have always been symptomatic of PestPatrol.
That's why I won't waste my money buying it and will just continue to
use their free online scanner at
www.pestscan.com (which itself
downloads and executes an ActiveX control, as do most of the online
scanners) and then wade through their manual eradication instructions
should it report any claimed infestations. I've also had false
positives from SpySweeper, one of which was simply because I had a
*folder* named Finance in my Favorites. I have yet to get a false
positive from Ad-Aware or Spybot S&D but I'm not saying that it doesn't
happen. With PestPatrol, you can use their database to lookup the pest
to read their manual removal instructions to see if you really are
infected with what they claim you have. For some pests, the
instructions can be long and tedious.
When you get an alert from PestPatrol
