[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by NEONKNIGHT

Is it wise to have so many anti-spyware programmes installed and running ?

With all the junk floating around the Internet even on legit sites? Yes, it damn well is. I might point out that the very first piece of scumware my PC caught - that damn Sasser worm - came from NTL itself. It wasn't there until I gave my Win 2000 partition Internet access, and it was there immediately afterwards - and I hadn't browsed any site other than NTL's home page (needless to say, less than three hours after this, I'd downloaded the Microsoft patch, bought & installed McAfee Firewall and bought VirusScan Online ). So if our own ISP isn't entirely safe, it behooves all of us to protect ourselves as much as possible.

Which means staying away from Kazaa and MSN, of course.

Besides, not all anti-spyware programs are running all the time; Ad-Aware, Spybot and HijackThis, to name three, don't do anything until you run them - it's the commercial third party software such as NAV, McAfee, Panda and ZA that run in the background. If you have broadband, they must run continuously, because broadband is of course an always-on service, unlike dialup. Ironic that we were actually safer back then, isn't it?

There was a time that such software was an option, and the vast majority of Internet users simply didn't need it. That time is now long past. Protection is now a necessity. Even Microsoft has, finally, woken up to this; they've created their own AV software which, I believe, effectively becomes part of Windows. Windows has until now had no AV measures incorporated into it.

Hopefully the issue of IE's vulnerability to ActiveX controls will be addressed in IE7. We shall see.