New and irritating error message after upgrading to ver 1.6

I upgraded Spybot Search & Destroy to version 1.6, and suddenly there's a new and irritating error message, to wit:

"System Settings Protector has stopped working"

and then it offers to let you shut down the program. It happens at startup, each and every time I restart, or shut-down-and-then-reboot, the machine.

I'm running Vista Home Premium, SP-1 on an HP Notebook with a 2 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM. I'm 30+ years in the computer industry, so, as you can imagine, my computer's both fairly clean and tightly organized; and I always know pretty much everything going on with it at all times.

Traditionally, this error is tied to one's having system restore disabled. But I've always had system restore disabled, and never got the error... not even right after applying SP-1, which will sometimes trigger the error on a machine that had been running for a long time with system restore disabled.

The error cropped-up immediately after upgrading to version 1.6 of Spybot S&D... hence the reason I suspect it to be somehow involved.

My next step, just for good measure, will be to completely de-install all versions of Spybot S&D, including removing from the system all traces thereof, including registry entries, leftover directories/folders, etc. Then reboot. Then re-install version 1.6 as if it were on a machine that had never had Spybot S&D on it. That sort of thing can sometimes help.

But I wanted to make sure that whomever around here cares about such things knows that on my system, at least, upgrading to version 1.6 appears to have caused a "System Settings Protector has stopped working" error.

(Er... well... plus, more than that, I'm also hoping that if anyone has a solution, they'll chime in, of course.)