A little over 2 years ago, my techie friend recommended that I install Ad-Aware SE personal (along with my Norton) on my 3 desktops and 1 laptop. Two of the desktops run Win98 and the others are XP.

I would update and scan these every day because I do some online banking. I always thought I was perfectly safe. As you all know, updates ceased in Dec.07. So I went to the lavasoft site and began reading.

I initially thought about downloading Ad-Aware 2007 free, but from the forums I read, I saw a lot of people having real problems. And it would not run on my 98 machines. I next thought about Ad-Aware 2007 Pro, because of the support and because it had the network feature (would it scan my 98 machines via the network?).

I saw from some of the posts that people were also using SpyBot. After a half a day of searching the net for comments about Spybot, I installed in on one of my 98 machines.

I did a “Check for problems” and much to my surprise it found 19 “real threats” Some of these were installed on this computer nine (that’s right 9) years ago! My Ad-Aware defs.ref file is dated 1/28/08 – the very latest.

Why would I even consider any LavaSoft product based upon this experience?