I discovered that if I booted up my computer in "Safe Mode with Networking" that my AdAware SE worked properly.
This indicated that the program was working properly and that something else was interfering with some of it's operations.
It was just a matter of disabling one application at a time and trying AdAware until the offending program was identified.
I'm not saying this approach would work for all the problems you are having with AdAware .... but it did help me to isolate the problem area I was having.
Akela16