On my home and work PCs, I have observed that Spybot increases its memory usage during a scan. I saw the same problem with Spybot v1.4, v1.5.2 and 1.6.0. My work PC runs XP Pro SP2 and has 1GB RAM, and I observed with Task Manager the commit charge increase from 363 to 395 MB (delta of 32MB) during a scan. My home PC runs XP Pro SP3 and has 288MB RAM, and I observed the commit charge increase by even more than 32MB, and the page file usage increased by over 300MB before the PC crashes. My home PC slows to a crawl during a Spybot scan, taking several hours before it crashes.

I do not have any other applications running at the same time with Spybot. I have Firefox and IE delete all cookies when they close. I have the Tea Timer disabled.

My work PC runs McAfee anti-virus, and the memory leak is not much of a problem since the PC has so much RAM. My home PC runs Norton Internet Security. I did not see the page file explosion and crash with NIS 2007 -- the serious problems did not start until I installed NIS 2008.

I emailed Spybot support for the problem (including the correlation with NIS 2007->2008) in October or November 2007, and ticket 683852323 was opened. Sandra Klass suggested that the problem is with Norton and the solution to the problem is for me to get more RAM, but my home PC is already loaded with the maximum RAM. Since I am not having problems with NIS 2008 and any other software except from Safer Networking, my solution is to use Ad-Aware instead of Spybot. Ad-Aware has been working just fine on both PCs for about a year.