spyware detection/removal programs (1 Viewer)

I'm looking for a decent spyware/adware/trojan detection/removal utility to supplement Norton Antivirus, and was wondering what people's opinions were of what's out there. I've tried (at some point) ad-aware and SpySweeper, but what I have is so out of date that starting from scratch would be a good idea. Is there something that's generally regarded as the "gold" standard in this arena yet?

I use Spybot to remove spyware and adware. It works great at removing annoying popups and it is free. For trojan horses you are going to have to get something like Trojan Hunter.

Between Adaware and Spybot (I use both) you should be able to catch most anything.

I too use Spybot and Adaware and they do a good job of finding and removing most but not all spyware.

Last week my browser got hijacked (pause for all of you who will undoubtedly say use Firebird, Mozilla, Opera, etc) and neither program could remove it. I even tried to manually edit the registry to no avail. Only rolling back to the prevoius day's restore point solved my problem (one thing XP seems to have gotten right).

Guess the moral is that no anti-spyware program is perfect. There are some nasty things out there.

Ad-Aware for me. The only thing it didn't get rid of was SandBoxer (PITA, IMHO), which was actually removeable with a link on their site, amazingly enough. It was/is great on everything else though.

I also use Ad-Aware:

http://www.lavasoft.de/

It's all just a matter of who has the latest updates or builds available. No one program can have it all with all the threats out there. I use Spyware first and Ad-Aware second, but usually don't have to since I'm a safe browser to begin with. :wink:

www.mozilla.com/firefox