Hi everyone,

Had some odd behavior with a program, worried it may have caused yet unseen damage and looking for some information or advice.

What happened:
I was in safe mode running some virus scans on my personal laptop, and it came time for Spybot. I opened it up as Admin. (I was doing my weekly scans, nothing really prompted it aside from that. If it matters, it all came up clean.)

I clicked for it to start a scan, but changed my mind and hit "Stop Scan" (I dont like to use it while it is scanning since it makes things take longer, wanted to do something else first) then attempted to close it. The program locked up and the blue bar where it normally displays the name "Spybot Search & Destroy" changed ot the following:

"Unloading user registry hives may take awhile.... "

Despite having used Spybot for some time, I have never seen this message and had no idea what it meant. After a few minutes of trying to get the program to respond (kept saying not responding), and in a bit of a panic, I used CTRL ALT DEL and killed the process.

I re-opened the program, it seemed fine. I have also been able to restart into safe mode and normal mode without issue and I havent noticed anything else odd. However.. I still find myself worried that I may have screwed something up by forcing it to close, since I generally avoid the registry like the plague from how much I hear of messing around with it completely breaking computers.

The only topic I could find in a search of this made mention of a few users who had it cease to run after that and one even said his AV stopped working. Glad it hasnt happened to me, but.. doesnt help me! D:

Anyway, onto my questions..

1 - Can anyone tell me what it was doing? Not an expert with computers, so.. dumb it down if possible.
2 - Could damage have been caused to my machine (mostly the registry) by forcing a close? Mind I was in a safe mode, if that matters.
2b - Can Spybot even cause damage to a machine? If not... I guess what happened to those people were unrelated with this. o.o
3 - Is it anything to worry about since nothing seems to be wrong?
4 - I have a Restore Point for Nov 23rd (it happened Nov 24th), should I do a system restore anyway just in-case?
4b - I read someone mention that system restore can corrupt-damage files.. hence why I havent used it yet. Is this true or were they just spouting nonsense?

Any help would be appreciated.

The machine:
Acer Laptop. Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium. Spybot S&D Version.. whatever was out on Nov23rd, I have not updated it since.