Spyware on the Guild?

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

Get kerio personal fire wall

I've heard a lot of raves about Zone Alarm firewall...

And for an anti-spyware / adaware program I use Ad-Aware SE Personal, does a cracking job

I lost faith in Microsoft Internet Explorer years ago, its just way too easy to exploit. I don't trust Google Toolbar either, something I'd read in the installation / setup / terms and conditions put me right off.

[Just A Girl]

All tool bars are Spy ware IMHO,
i dont advize installing them

[ezoons]

ZoneAlarm & Proxomitron Naoko.
Have been using this combo for 3 years - no complaints. I haven't seen a banner, let alone a pop-up in ages (unless I switch off the Proxo filters - some pages use pop-ups for useful stuff).

[lugh]

Yeah, a tracking cookie. Still, from what I read it only tracks the click on the ad, nothing else.

I use:Spybot, Ad-aware, Zonealarm firewall, SpywareBlaster and then Privacy Mantra and CCleaner to get rid of tracks and Hijack this every now and then to do a full read of the registry since none of the programs can catch everything.
Oh and Winpatrol to catch registry edits since Spybot can miss some of them as they happen too.

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

It gets really annoying IMO when companies, agencies etc pass your email address (bet they charge each other for this) around the web to third parties. Then you get the direct spam mail from <Hell>, it just never stops once you end up on their mailing lists. The filtering and blocking settings do a decent job at catching most things, but it never catches them all, s'pose this is impossible. They always change the wording of their email addresses - most are some random code of digits and letters anyway.

I've sort of defeated this problem by setting up literally half-a-dozen email accounts with different providers to avoid this problem. Think only one of these gets any serious spam on a daily basis, so its not all bad

[Kaldhore]

I used the free version of Zone Alarm till around about 3 months ago. Then I upgraded - there was an offer on at my local pc world for ZA professional - dudes its great. Especially the email spam filter. It also has a good AV (no norton asimilating MY PC and cause all to crash). Theres a pop-up blocker and a spy/ad/tracker scanner too. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I run a wireless network from this pc too.