I recently updated to ad-aware 8.1 on both my laptop OP system XP Professional and desk top OP system XP Home edition. When I run a scan on my laptop (don't know if it is at the end of the scan or not, never sat there long enough to watch the whole scan) when it seems to be done the program is no longer on the tool bar but still in the system tray stating there are objects detected. When I click on the icon nothing happens the program will not open (unless you turn off the computer and reboot, but then the objects detected during the scan are gone). If I do a scan and stop it during the scan and no objects are detected the program closes and opens with no problem, if just one object is detected and I stop the scan and close the program and try to open it it will not open.

I have read many of the topics that there was a problem with Norton and adaware but I am not running any Norton's. All I have is AVG 8.5 free and Spybot 1.6.2, on both computers.

-Spybot on the laptop (when I opened it) gave me an error message of software conflicts and took me to a link which stated:

If you have the Ad Aware option to scan inside archives enabled, Ad Aware may find files in the Spybot-S&D folder. Spybot-S&D does not contain any spyware, but it creates backups of everything you fix (until you remove those backups from the Recovery list), and Ad Aware complains about these backups. You can safely ignore these backups found by Adaware.

What I did was unchecked the scan archive in adaware and ran the scan again same thing nothing changed.

-Spybot on my desktop does not even open since updating to adaware 8.1, which was working when I had the adaware anniversary edition.

Don't know if it is Spybot or Adaware.

Any help that I have not tried would be great, I have sent the problem to tech support for spybot, waiting on a response from them.

If there is no help, could I get a link to a site where I could download the old version (Adaware Anniversary edition). I know that one worked with spybot on my desktop. Never got to try Adaware Anniversary edition on my laptop before it upgraded.

Thanks

Aside from the Norton problem which has carried over from AE to 8.1, there seems to be a new problem with 8.1 scans stalling at [enumerating clsids]. Not sure if it's related to Ad-Aware shutting down with objects detected, as you describe, but that's also been reported here since 8.1 was released. No word back yet from Lavasoft. For scans stalling at "enumerating clsid's", please check this thread for updates.

For Spybot, try exiting Ad-Aware by right-clicking the tray icon, then see if Spybot will open. If it still won't open, then I don't think it's Spybot since they haven't had a software update since Jan-Feb. Most likely, since Ad-Aware detected something, that malware is what's causing Ad-Aware to crash and keeping Spybot from opening.

Read the instructions in my signature:

1. post a log in the HijackThis forum. Copy/paste or link to this thread to describe the problem, and somebody there can help you with malware removal.

2. submit malware to Lavasoft for analysis - this will help in future definitions and software updates

Oh, and I forgot to add - somebody else here was able to find AE 8.0.7 online, but didn't give the link. You can probably Google it, but be quick, most places will soon only have the current version. It's a good idea to save old installer files for programs you like, just in case. If you find it and install it, don't forget to turn off auto-update, or AE will try to update to 8.1. You can manually update definitions only - see the FAQs in my signature.

I'm having the same problem with the new update. After I run a scan, the program will not open back up so I can remove the detected items. I tried uninstalling and starting over, but I still have the same problem.

This is my problem too. I have Windows xp pro sp3-- spybot, spywareblaster ,windowsfender,AVG for virus protection. I removed ad-aware completely twice and for now will wait to look for improvements to ad-aware. BTW only added spywareblaster after removing ad-aware. I hope that when a fixed version is available news of this will be posted, as ad-aware is my favorite spyware

Thanks for a good product,
rederf