Two bits of good news in one post.  :)

I've been a long-term user of Process Guard, but have been holding off on GhostSecurity RegDefend due to a few limitations with 1.X.  2.0 looks like a significant step forward so I'm looking forward to trying it out again.  RegDefend has a growing reputation over at Wilders for being an excellent, and perhaps essential addition to PC protection in this dangerous world.

I'm also looking forward to Jason's views on PC security and software development.

Thanks Jason!

CounterSpy is notorious for false positives and it seems that since the acquisition of Giant by Microsoft the (CounterSpy is a rebadged Giant variant) false positives have increased further as Sunbelt (a rebadging/marketing vendor rather than a dedicated developer) have been forced to take on product deployment in-house.  I'm pretty safe to say this is a perfect example of a false positive, though it would do no harm to check with MS Anti-Spyware, SpyBot and Ad-Aware for peer confirmation.

You may also want to submit any dubious files to the excellent Jotti Malware Scanner: -

http://virusscan.jotti.org/

I understand your sentiment and can also confirm that many software companies do indeed have a conscience and would (do) provide software for free if/when they feel it is a just cause (I know of cases where software has been provided to the UN and humanitarian agencies for exactly this reason - think tsunami).  At the same time, software companies will make pennies from the lite versions of their product and can only hope to spread it so widely as to make enough overall to be worth bothering at all, or to attract enough new customers to the pro version because of the additional features it offers over the lite version they no doubt have only recently discovered, via bundling etc.  I do agree that there are many disparities in current software licenses which I can only hope are ironed out over time, yet I strongly believe that a good product is always worth its price to an interested party.

Think about CD burning software here.  With every $40 DVD burner sold a software writing solution is bundled with it.  For most end users (think your parents here) who just want to burn the occasional documents or digital camera pictures the bundled solution is perfect.  The software company get an almost incalculably small sum from each sale but hope to make it up on the bulk of sales.  For techies who want to make their own Boot DVDs, Video DVDs, AAC/MPEG4/MP3Pro/Ogg DVDs etc. etc. the bundled solution is not suitable and the pro version is worth every penny for these additional features and perhaps a small discount to trade up from one license to another benefits everyone.