I've been running Spybot S&D for almost five years now, through several versions. I'm still on the same computer but recently had to reinstall Windows to a new hard drive when my old one became erratic. That was when the trouble started.

Here's what consistently happens:

-- I click on the Desktop shortcut to "C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy\SpybotSD.exe"

-- After a while, maybe 5 or 10 seconds, the usual low, wide "Loading Spybot - Search & Destroy..." window appears and the blue progress "bar" begins growing from left to right.

-- In the past, when SpybotSD was loading normally, it used to take quite a while, maybe 30 seconds, for the progress bar to extend all the way across. Instead, after only a few seconds (and with the bar only 4 squares long), it hesitates for a moment, then a dialog pops up:

-----------------------------------
Error
(X)
Access violation at address 007B6945 in module 'SPYBOTSD.EXE'. Read of address 5976C4C2
[OK]
-----------------------------------

After I click the "OK" button the bar quickly grows by two more blocks, then disappears and the Spybot S&D main window opens -- a much shorter loading time than normal. If I click "Check for problems", the scan is ridiculously brief (a second or so) and the logfile reports that 0 objects were actually scanned.

-- If I go (in Advanced Mode) to Settings | File sets, the white box where I'd expect to see the file sets is utterly empty. If I click on "(?) Help" I get the error message:

------------------------------
Help
Cannot open the file: ::/html/filesets.html
[OK]
------------------------------

There's a similar response to the "(?) Help" on the Settings page except that the file named is "::/html/settings.html". I've never found a file with either name on either my previous system or my current one.

I've tried (several times now) uninstalling, then reinstalling Spybot S&D 1.6.2 -- by starting directly with the 1.6.2 installer (spybotsd162.exe); by starting with 1.6.0 (spybotsd160.exe) and letting it update to 1.6.2; and by running the most recently loaded 1.6.2 installer (setup-spybotsd162.exe). I continue to get the same error, at the same stage of loading, with the same addresses named. At one point, when I'd just installed 1.6.0 but not yet updated to 1.6.2, the error dialog popped up at the same point but the addresses were different: 007802C3 and FFFFFFFF, respectively.

This problem never happened on my original Windows system. It happened a few times right after I moved to the new hard drive but one of the uninstall-reinstalls seemed to clear it up. Then, in the course of trying to install Windows to my newly-added D: drive I apparently changed something on this C: drive. When I "reinstalled" Windows on C:, almost everything else worked (only AVG wanted its license key again) but Spybot S&D hasn't loaded normally since.

I remember that toward the end of that one successful update/download/install maybe a week ago, several things popped up that I've never seen during any of the unsuccessful ones. A "Legal Stuff" window may have among them; in fact, I remember thinking to myself when I saw it, that that download must be working better than my other attempts.

In a post from a little more than a month ago (http://forums.spybot.info/showthread...582#post294582), someone suggests testing for SpybotSD.exe corruption as follows:

Look for a randomly named file with a .scr extension (JLOSSAOBEIIZCOIQOD.scr for example) that is the same size as the SpybotSD.exe file. ... Double click on the randomly named file with a .scr extension and see if Spybot executes.
Mine, C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy\CIMVTQI.scr, does execute exactly like SpybotSD.exe, access violation and all.

How do I get the use of Spybot S&D back?

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Dell Precision 220, Pentium 3, 733 MHz, 265 MB RAM
Windows 98SE
I browse with Firefox 2.0.0.20, hardly ever with IE.