Cannot Un-immunize!

[seamusoldfield]

Hi all, brand new forum member here.

I recently immunized and found it to be more annoying than useful. It slowed Firefox to a crawl and is just, well, really annoying. I "un-immunized" and nothing happened. Same blocked ads, same slow browser. A Spybot rep (bless his heart) personally answered my e-mail, though his advice was useless. I ended up simply un-installing Spybot thinking that would solve the problem, but it hasn't. Same blocked ads, same slow browser.

What on earth do I have to do to get my browser back?

Any advice is very much appreciated.

Thanks!

[drragostea]

I wouldn't be so sure if it's Spybot then (if everything is unimmunized, uninstallation the program should not matter since the suspect is the Immunization). What version of Firefox are you running? Spybot version (Help>About)?

And what did the representative say? Can you quote his advice?

[seamusoldfield]

Hi drragostea,

Thank you for responding. I think I actually got it fixed. I posted this same question on another forum and got as ton of great responses.

In a nutshell, it looks like my problem was that Spybot was not letting me fully un-immunize because I wasn't running in Admin mode. I was also unable to untick the box to disable SDHelper (as the rep suggested) for the same reason. Once I got running in Admin mode, I was able to fully un-immunize and untick the box - problem solved.

I should note (and as someone on that other forum pointed out), that I should have been more careful when I said the rep's advice was "useless." That came off as unduly harsh. The rep, to his credit, got back to me fairly quickly in a personalized e-mail. He also went back and forth with me several times trying to diagnose the problem. While his original advice did not work for me, his response was far from "useless."

Thanks again for getting back to me.

[drragostea]

Alright then. I'm glad to hear that your problem was resolved. Have a great day.

[seamusoldfield]

drragostea, if you're still here . . . it's back. The problem is back. For a few brief, shining moments, my Web pages were full of ads and loading quickly. Now, inexplicably, it's back to blocking them and my pages are crawling along. I have no idea what's going on. Here's what I've done:

Un-immunized.
Unchecked the box next to enable SDHelper from the Tools --> Resident --> menu.
Checked the Host file - there are no domains associated with Spybot.

I have no idea how to fix this.

Possible problem: I have Webroot SpySweeper and AdAware running. Is this causing conflicts?

Help?

[drragostea]

What version of Spybot-Search&Destroy are you running? How about Firefox?

Have you tried disabling Webroot's Spysweeper and unimmunizing?
What OS do you run?

[seamusoldfield]

Thanks so much for writing back. You've hit the nail on the head; I shutdown SpySweeper and the ad blocking / immunizing stopped. Evidently SpyBot and SpySweeper don't play well together :)

I'm running Vista SP1, SpyBot 1.6.2 and Firefox 3.0.1.

Ugh. How do I fix this? I'd like to keep running SpySweeper as I've had good luck with it in the past. Can I get the two to play nice together?

Thanks again!

[drragostea]

Well, what you can simply do is reenable the shields after you have Immunized : )

[seamusoldfield]

So . . . wait. You're saying that post immunization, that somehow dropped all my SpySweeper shields?

So the order would be - 1) Re-immunize, 2) re-up my SpySweeper shields?

That's it?

Why would immunization cancel out my SS shields?

[drragostea]

I think there seems to be a misunderstanding (maybe I was not clear in my response).

What I'm saying is that I would suggest you disable Webroot Spysweeper's Shields when you Immunize Spybot, because SpySweeper seems to have a similar function of Immunization like Spybot in one of it's shields.

So what happens is that you'll have to disable all the shields momentarily and after you have Immunized reenable them again.

[seamusoldfield]

I see - that makes perfect sense. I'll give it a shot. Thanks so much for taking so much time with me - I really appreciate it!