I've got a customer with a weird problem. When he runs Ad-Watch (from the Ad-Aware 2007 Plus distribution) it immediately starts flooding him with requests for registry changes. He denies all requests. When things settle down, all his file extensions (or at least the important ones) have been reset. He can no longer run programs or open documents. I was able to find some utilities that restored his registry entries for the file extensions to their default values, but that's a bit awkward. None of the virus scanners (he runs AVG by default, but I tried a bunch like Stinger, etc.) find anything wrong. If he doesn't launch Ad-Watch nothing bad seems to happen, but as soon as he launches Ad-Watch for any reason he goes right back to the symptom.

Any ideas on what might be going on? Is there some malware out that that Ad-Aware doesn't recognize that's targeting Ad-Watch users?

So, I gather no one has seen anything like this in the past? I'll just have him remove Ad-Watch and maybe start the process of trying to get his money refunded... :-(

We will look into this. In the meantime, I recommend making use of the User List, where you can set Registry access rights on an application basis, hence allowing parts of Windows, and other trusted applications to make changes to the registry.

Regards, Tobias