New Spybot - Search & Destroy = Teh Suck

I was installing the driver for the network printer on J.J.'s computer when I noticed that his Norton Antivirus subscription had expired, and along with that, the anti-spyware programs (namely, Spybot and Ad-Aware) were both older versions--from the last time I installed and ran them a long time ago. So I decided that I would new versions of the anti-spyware programs, as well as AntiVir, which is supposed to work better than NAV, anyway.

That's when I found out that there's a new version of Spybot - Search & Destroy that came out at the first of this month. Interesting that the program's update function doesn't bother trying to inform me of such an event, but I guess it's just as well.

While the new version of Spybot (1.4) is probably better than the last version (1.3) at finding spyware, I have no way of knowing, since it has found nothing except cookies on the systems I ran it on. I don't particularly find cookies to be a major concern in the area of spyware/adware, since its presence has no effect on my system and my browsing experience, other than taking up a little bit of disk space. Running Firefox along with Adblock has that advantage.

But that's not the main issue. I applaud Spybot's effort to recognize Firefox and attempt to find adware attempts in the Firefox profile. The problems are:

1. Worthless initial scan. When I first ran Spybot 1.4 (after having uninstalled the older versions), it didn't find anything at all in its initial scan. One may naturally assume that there is no problem and continue their merry way in using the computer. The only sign that something was amiss was that the scan finished way too quickly, although one of the improvements of 1.4 is that its scan time was significantly improved. I went back to run a second scan on one of the systems, because I'd forgotten to remove the default "ignore products" list. This second scan took longer than the initial scan, and it was during this second run that it found cookies it deemed were spyware.
2. "Ignore Cookies" doesn't work. I noticed that some of the cookies that were listed as problems included my login information at iwon.com. I use iwon daily, and don't want to have to log in manually every time. So I go to the "Ignore Cookies" section to add these cookies to the ignore list. These very same cookies still show up as problems in subsequent scans, instead of being ignored.

Since I don't care about cookies anyway, in my case, it would be easier to just set it to ignore all cookies and be done with it. Sadly, such an option is not available. Hopefully this will be possible in future versions. Until then, I will not use the updated version of Spybot at home.