When I see my gal on weekends, I update her Spybot and run it. There's usually 15 to 30 tracking cookies. Yesterday, there were NONE! Now, I don't like to look a gift horse in the mouth, but this seems to good to be true. Has anyone had Spybot malfunction and give a clean bill of health by missing stuff? I'm just a tad suspicious, but I hope I'm wrong. Thanks.

Nothing strange about that, She didnt turn the computer on all week! :)

I can't seem to nail this down. In recent posts, there's been talk of a 'bad' set of spyware definitions, or corrupted downloads, from Spybot (end of January, start of February). Again, talk--no proof one way or the other. Just to make sure, I first scan with Spybot, then scan with AdAware and Bazooka.

Found this; "You may have noticed that after updating Spybot on February 2nd 2004, it will no longer list or find common tracking cookies it always found before. This is because a file was changed in that update and caused that unfortunate problem. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you." "This will be fixed in the next update."

Dog Head. You can beat tracking cookies and never look back. Here's a tip, but remember that this doesn't block the cookie it just cuts its b... oops! neutralizes its effects. Don McCuiston shares a useful tip on using the Windows Hosts file. Look in your Windows directory for a file named Hosts - No file extension, just Hosts (this file is analogous to Unix's /etc/hosts file). (On Windows NT/2000/XP systems, this file is located in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\). If the file doesn't exist, create it. Open the file in your favourite text editor, and add lines like the following: 127.0.0.1 ad.server.com 127.0.0.1 junk.factory.com 127.0.0.1 adspam.com using the names of the actual ad-servers you don't want connections to. Be sure the first thing on the line is 127.0.0.1 (this is a reference to your own machine) and save the file. Now when the adware goes looking to download more ads, or share information it has collected on you, it will make a connection back to your own machine instead of the adserver it's trying to access. Obviously it will not find what it is looking for ;) The program will no longer drain your bandwidth by downloading ads--in fact, it will not be accessing the internet at all! I've heard you can also use the address 0.0.0.0 in place of 127.0.0.1; this is said to increase performance but cause problems under some configurations. On further inspection, this is probably not a good idea in some circumstances; I am told 0.0.0.0 is the default gateway on many Win/Linux machines. Those running Web services (Personal Web Server, etc.) on the system should be reminded that an agressive piece of spyware hammering 127.0.0.1 with invalid requests can slow it down.