Thought some more about your situation. You know rather than suspect
CounterSpy of having conflicts with Defender, I'd be looking first at
Norton and then SpySweeper. Norton at 2006 and 2007 did produce a number
of known conflicts with Defender. I see it myself moderately in NIS 2005
but I just disabled the Norton checkmark that enables self protection in my
Norton Products since old Peter Norton was complaining about Defender as
well as SpySweeper in the Symantec Resource Protector Activity Log reports.
This conflict got worse with his versions for 2006 and 2007 as I recall
reading the Ms forums (politically & technically they began fighting for
the Anti-spyware & AV market about that time.)
As to SpySweeper, I think they haven't gotten things very right since
version 5.0 and many reported conflicts with various AS and AV competitors.
Personally I'm backlevel at 4.5.9 where it was one of, if not the best
products on the market, and Ms AS was only my second line of defense. I
won't install newer versions of SS until the forums (CastleCops in
particular) quit reporting that it's totally disruptive of systems using
multiple layers of protection. Since you obviously believe in that
multi-layer approach you should be suspicious of SS, although I haven't
heard you speak of any high system overhead, which I'd expect to see if
that were the case. Hope some of this background info helps you.
Re: the reboot... I only asked for it to make sure everything was totally
refreshed. Normally, it shouldn't be required.