Too all those people suffering with V5. There is hope!

[petercardiff]

I posted a new topic yesterday saying how bad V5 of SD is, and numbers of you have replied saying the same - only 2 people told me to shut up!

But, Guess what? I think I've solved my problem.

Originally I was so unhappy that I uninstalled V5 and went back to V4 (as many of us have done).

But I thought, after reading a posting from the SUPPORT guys that they might have a release coming out next week which just might help, that I'd re-install V5 and see what happens.....

First of all, absolute mayhem. Crashed the whole PC. It just froze everything up. I restarted XP and turned off the Phishing filter (as support have suggested something might be wrong with this!) and turned off the ON GUARD setting in SD 5.

I also when into "Autoruns" and manually deleted any old startup items which referred to SD4 which hadn't been removed automatically by the update.

And it works fine. Not slowing down the PC.

So I turned Phishing back on and that's fine too.

Turned ON GUARD back on and that's fine too.

So, somehow - it's all working. No slowness, no freezing, it's doing what it should do. But how?

To everyone who is having problems - follow what I did and see if it helps.

I was hard on PC Tools for what they had released and I'm still annoyed that it didn't work first time - but there again, does anything that Microsoft release work as it should?

Good luck to everyone and I'm sure even if this doesn't work - there will be something coming along very soon which will.

[Support]

Hi petercardiff,

It is good to know that Spyware Doctor 5.0 is now working properly in your computer. This is a major product release by PC Tools and we have a lot of faith in Spyware Doctor 5.0. We will definitely try our best to fix all the reported problems in order to make Spyware Doctor 5.0 the best spyware removal software available on the market.

Kind Regards

PC Tools Support

[Robin Springall]

Couple of questions before I take the plunge and upgrade.
1. Is there a phishing filter in SD5, and does it interfere with the one built into IE7?
2. Do PCT advise users to completely uninstall SD4 before installing v5?

[Saxel]

There is certainly a phishing filter in SD 5 its part of the site guard.
I'm running IE6 for reasons unrelated to SD.

I would recommend that you shut down or exit SD4, uninstall it and reboot before installing SD5.

Depending what other security software you have installed it could be advisable to disconnect from the internet and close down any other security applications before the install, then reactivate and reconnect to the internet

[john7]

You may be lucky, I did all the right things Removing SD4, closing Avast, shuting down Zone Alarm and rebooting. All for nothing and ended taking version 5 off as the PC was unusable.Back on Version 4 and all the prblems have gone.

[petercardiff]

My computer just froze completely again whilst using IE7.

It has happened repeatedly whilst browsing www.cablehell.co.uk

The only way I could get my computer to run back to normal was to totally shut down SD5. Close IE7. Then restart SD5.

While this was all happening I opened the Tasklist to see if anything was running at a high CPU rate. But nothing was more than 1% and that was the Tasklist itself.

So, I don't understand what was causing the freeze.

I hope this might help the Support guys a bit.

While I was trying to close SD5 it did show me the main status screen and it was "checking" on all the items on the left which are usually ticked Green. I wonder if this is anything?

[socrfan]

I posted a new topic yesterday saying how bad V5 of SD is, and numbers of you have replied saying the same - only 2 people told me to shut up!

But, Guess what? I think I've solved my problem.

Originally I was so unhappy that I uninstalled V5 and went back to V4 (as many of us have done).

But I thought, after reading a posting from the SUPPORT guys that they might have a release coming out next week which just might help, that I'd re-install V5 and see what happens.....

First of all, absolute mayhem. Crashed the whole PC. It just froze everything up. I restarted XP and turned off the Phishing filter (as support have suggested something might be wrong with this!) and turned off the ON GUARD setting in SD 5.

I also when into "Autoruns" and manually deleted any old startup items which referred to SD4 which hadn't been removed automatically by the update.

And it works fine. Not slowing down the PC.

So I turned Phishing back on and that's fine too.

Turned ON GUARD back on and that's fine too.

So, somehow - it's all working. No slowness, no freezing, it's doing what it should do. But how?

To everyone who is having problems - follow what I did and see if it helps.

I was hard on PC Tools for what they had released and I'm still annoyed that it didn't work first time - but there again, does anything that Microsoft release work as it should?

Good luck to everyone and I'm sure even if this doesn't work - there will be something coming along very soon which will.


I too was having some problems cropping up again after what seemed like a good install a day ago. I had gone back to SD4. So I did an uninstall of SD4, ran Registry Mechanic to clean up the registry, deleted any left over SD4 folders and did a reboot. I then shut down SpySweeper with anti-virus and did an install of SD5 (without AV).

Now IE7 is running back up to speed again. The only problem I'm still experiencing is if you stop a scan or try to switch from one window to another such as "start scan" to "status" the program tends to freeze and I cannot shut it down nor can the Task Manager. Also, they need to optimize the scan speed. SD5 did find a few things that SD4 missed so that's a positive. Still not perfect but much better than before.

[anastrophe]

My computer just froze completely again whilst using IE7.

It has happened repeatedly whilst browsing www.cablehell.co.uk

The only way I could get my computer to run back to normal was to totally shut down SD5. Close IE7. Then restart SD5.

While this was all happening I opened the Tasklist to see if anything was running at a high CPU rate. But nothing was more than 1% and that was the Tasklist itself.

So, I don't understand what was causing the freeze.

I hope this might help the Support guys a bit.

While I was trying to close SD5 it did show me the main status screen and it was "checking" on all the items on the left which are usually ticked Green. I wonder if this is anything?


here's another 'me too'. i did the same as petercardiff - deinstalled, turned off phishing filter in IE7, reinstalled, turned off onguard, everything seemed to work again, turned onguard back on, and everything still seemed to work - for a while. but after ten or fifteen minutes, everything gradually ground to a halt. looking at the task manager, nothing was eating cpu cycles. i killed all the spyware doctor processes, closed and reopened my browser, and things were better, but still not 100% at normal speed. started up spyware doctor again, and - just as petercardiff experienced - the status page came up, with everything listed as 'checking'. i stepped away from the computer for a few minutes, when i came back they were all ticked green, but i don't know really how long it took. however - it was 'hosed' regardless. putting the mouse arrow over the sd status screen it would go into eternal hourglass mode. killed it off manually again. deinstalled it again.

i'm perfectly happy to be patient - as others have pointed out, often times the developers aren't the final arbiters of when a program gets released, and sometimes programs are released over their objections. i just hope this doesn't do too much damage to PC tools in the long haul. if PC Magazine were to review SD5 right now, it could garner a terrible review, and that could really hurt the bottom line.....

[prihod]

Recently I installed Spyware Doctor 5 on my pc and it runs without any issues (Spyware Doctor 5 I installed was without AV plugin). Before the installation I uninstalled Spyware Doctor 4, then rebooted in safe mode with networking and installed Spyware Doctor 5, and guess what, no issues at all. From security software I have installed on my pc is only Kasperskiy Anti-virus 6.

By the way Spyware Doctor 5 has one process and two services running, at least in my task manager, on of them is I think is interface (which is sdTray ... something) another one is actual core application (sdCoreService) and some (sdAuxService)

[petercardiff]

When I originally posted this thread saying that I thought everything was now ok. I was wrong.

My PC has now totally stopped working.

I've had to go into Safe Mode and uninstall SD5 completely and go back to SD4 again!

[User]

Hi,

I think PC Tools will work on this issue as their first priority. There are some people who have no problem with SD5 at all, however there are also a great number of people complaining about problem with SD5. So I guess they will have to solve this problem as soon as possible.


Cheers

[jwsolve]

Well I've done a bit of monitoring with sysinternals process monitor and it seems that for certain sites there are buffer overflows for "swdsvc.exe" in all of the packedCatalogItems under:-

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinSock2\Pa rameters\Protocol_Catalog9\Catalog_Entries

Which all seem to relate to the filtering dlls for spyware doctor 5 at the point of slow down. Also because it looks like these relate to the Network Guard, I turned it and everything off within this section but they still appear to run with buffer overflows.

Also I get buffer overflows in Firefox sessionstore.js when I copied and pasted into this quick reply and tried to type after - causing my machine to hang until it had finished.

There is a difference with Network Guard turned off though and now I've turned off Keylogger Guard as well. Currently working okay, but I'll keep you all posted on the next slowdown.

EDIT: The next slowdown was actually as I submitted this post.

EDIT 2: In fact every program that is run, word, excel etc that slows down is causing a buffer overflow under the Winsock registry entry relating to SD. Once these have cleared the program opens as normal, after the initial approx 30 sec delay.

[AChen]

Hi jwsolve,

Thanks for providing us with this information. :) This is very useful.

Cheers,
Anthony

[btman]

When I originally posted this thread saying that I thought everything was now ok. I was wrong.

My PC has now totally stopped working.

I've had to go into Safe Mode and uninstall SD5 completely and go back to SD4 again!

lmfao.....