Spyware, viruses, & security forum: Virus or not?!! : SpyHunter v 2.7

It is far from a virus its main purpose is as a registry cleaner and it comes in very handy when cleaning vundo. I would recomend retaining it on the system in a archived or ziped format to keep it from running in the background. Because this is a scanning tool it wants to run in the background and will slow your computer down. just use it when you need it and then uninstall it when you dont. The program your friend is thinking of is spybot this program is not a virus but just a very tight mailware engine. this is a grat tool in its trial version because you get the full process trees for all the things it identifies but it likes to create havoc with other programs so I would not recomend it for full version use, after use uninstall then kill its teatimer.exe.. The best thing you can do is read up on these programs. I would recomend dropping the 20 some $'s and getting spywear doctor for a year and backing up or creating restore points before any instilations and just being safe about it. wikipedia has some great resources to start with just type in mailware. Then move on to using hijackthis at startup post one of your logs and get feed back, anything you dont understand just type in the extension like .exe on google and you will be able to read about it. If you keep your firewall in good working order, scan files and downloads before you install, you shouldn't have problems anyway. With great reward comes great risk, there is no safe way to get things for free except to be smarter than the other guy....

Spybot search and destroy is one of the sites that I listed and spyware doctor is the best in the west so far. The forum is nice and the page is simplpe and very fast(searchability is key). But as for all of the downloads of spywear programs it is a matter of taste. I for one still use my dos prompt and use ultra edit so I am alittle more at home with findstr, edit, ect. but I still think that if you dont undestand the problem, process, or solution, You are already dead in the water. 3 simple rules
1.have somthing good always running in the background that runs your firewall, and alerts you to registry changes and finds harmful programs as well as creates restore points after clean full scans.
(spyware doctor for me as well as norton 360)
2.have some other programs archived to help you with any of the weakpoints that the main programs has like a startup scanning program that creates a list of all processes and active programs.(startup scanner is hijack this for me)(my archived programs spybot search and destroy, panda, vundofix, spyhunter)
3.tweak the settings for the way you work(make sure all of your firewalls are on the same page)and you compesate for the areas that you are weakest, downloading, filesharing, email, questionable viewing or bad sites, online gaming ect.

Hopefully this answers your question and if it dosent this will.

spybot is not a virus because you have to run it to let it take control so it would fall under the mailware catagory and even then if you know what you are doing it is useful so I guess it all boils down to paying attention to what you are doing...