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New Mozilla Firefox user

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m_s:
It is mostly okay, but here's not much point in having them all running all the time.  Just make sure you've got some protection in each of the main areas of intrusion protection, antivirus, pestproofing.  I would definitely recommend a good firewall and antivirus program as essential, and then would add some realtime protection - MS AntiSpyware is free and pretty good, though it misses some important things.  I also use Trojan Hunter (www.trojanhunter.com), though I've recently switched off its realtime protection and just scan periodically.  I like very much Online Armor (www.tallemu.com), because it brings together the features of a number of these programs into one package - but I've recently uninstalled it, because it was doing silly things with Gmail and with these forums (I had to press 'Post' four or five times before it would let things through - each time it came back with a 'timed-out' message); the developer tells me he's working on v.2, which will address these issues.  CarolHaynes started a thread on using a Hosts file for safer surfing - search for that, and read the article on the site she points to; it's got some good advice.

mouser:
i would *not* run multiple *resident scanning* programs at the same time.

it's fine to have multiple programs installed that only scan on demand, but i would disable all but one resident (i.e. running always in the background) spyware/adware scanner, and onlt one resident antivirus, and only one resident firewall scanner.

Carol Haynes:
Definitely don't run CounterSpy with Microsoft AntiSpyware - they are known to conflict.

For what it's worth I use resident scanning with SpySweeper and MS AntiSpyware at the same time without any issues.

I also have DiamondCS ProcessGuard running. This stops any programs running without explicit permission. You can set it to allow a program to run automatically, but one of the great things is it stops drivers etc. being installed without you noticing. The other great thing is that once you have said yes to a particular app or service everytime it starts in the future PG checks the file before allowing it to run to make sure it hasn't changed. If it has changed (eg. after an update/upgrade) it warns you and you have to allow it again.

The other program I have chuntering along silently is Ghost Security Suite's RegDefend. This is rule based (and comes with a good set of default rules) and allows you to monitor potentially dangerous registry changes and again give specific apps access to various registry operations.

Betsy:
Well, I just ran Spy Sweeper, and it found 18 things that the Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D missed (I ran those two right before running Spy Sweeper.)  I'm glad it found them, but I'm totally bummed because I just wasted $30 getting the full version of Ad Aware.  I doubt I have a ghost of a prayer of getting any refunds on that....

Thanks again to the person who recommended Spy Sweeper.  You may have saved my sanity, if in fact this eliminates my problem!

I'm gonna go do some surfing and see how it goes.

Betsy, I'm a little worried that you might have more of a problem than you realise - popups are one symptom of various adware and spyware infestations.  I think it might be worth your while to download a trial version of SpySweeper or something like that and run a test.  I read your list of security apps, but I have had experience of each of these being fallible, so I think it could be worth testing with another reputable scanner.
-m_s (December 02, 2005, 09:41 AM)
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mouser:
we've discussed in this forum how careful you have to be to insure that stuff these programs "find" are really the bad things they say they are.

these programs tend to flag stuff that is good and mistake it for something different which is similar -
just be careful what you let it delete until you are SURE it is in fact the bad thing that the program says it is -
sometimes a similar name can confuse it and you end up deleting something important and harmless.

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