Thanks Zenobia,
The advice you gave below worked

"If you have a Spybot icon on your desktop,try rightclicking that and click Run As Administrator,if it is available in the rightclick menu."

I got no result at all from the start menu whereas right clicking the icon worked. All other references on the net just mentioned the start menu approach. I don't know why spybot doesn't have an option on the main menu as it caused me to waste a lot of time as I'm sure it would a lot of other users.

Don