I can understand how giant and spysweeper make top places.... but unfortunately i have never had good results with ad-aware.... computers that have endless hassles with spyware-related slugishness, errors etc, i have never had ad-aware solve the problem.... and initially i did believe in it.... 90% of the time, spybot will find the culprit, and remove it. Computer runs fine again afterwards.
And to bypass the spyware that wont allow a spyware cleaner to run on startup... easy... run enitall, kill it and run the spyware cleaner...
What i also like about spybot, that i havnt found in others yet, is it fixes your "DSO exploits" (aka Active X vulnerabilities that allows code to be executed on your computer without you needing to give permission - it changes it, so that a message appear saying "You have to click yes to download / execute" yet the site never asked you anything. and aborts the execution.... this is how most spyware still climbs onto your system.... so if you install spybot, (or since they tell you where to find the problems and how to fix it, you can afterwards do it manually without spybot installed) before you start hopping around on the internet (after a fresh installation of windows), i have found that your chances of not getting spyware improves DRAMATICALLY.
I think your top performing spyware cleaners, not only focuses on the more noticable (in the computer performance and harmful side effects area) spyware / malware, but also focuses on general activeX code....
E.g Giant notoriously finds desdemona's BD page and blocks it as harmfull... i looked at the code on her page, and as far as i can see, there is no harmful code anywhere... but her menu's are activeX-driven....
So if i look at the level of userfriendlyness, compared to the prevention of harmful effects to your computer.... (never mind teh freeware stuff - but thats a HUGE added bonus), i still like spybot....
ANd in the last 2 months, spybot has increased its malware list from 13000 items, to over 22 000.... whereas i havnt noticed such a big increase in any of the other's lists. (Maybe spybot is trying to catch up)
