I recently open this post, but I have done other researches and I'll copy here my conclusions. By the way, I doesn't have any more problems with spybot, I have found that I did have a lot of programs running without my knowledge, now I hardly arrive to a 36% of GDI:
1. It is a fact, the new version of Spybot does use more resources, but... no so many as I think before...
2. On w98SE it is not enough to see the task manager in order to know what is really running, remember there are a lot of programs running that could be started by the startup, by other appls, or they have marked as started in the configuration of each program (as Windows messenger, winamp, etc).
3. The problem is mainly with the great amount of 16bits appls. To know what are they follow these steps:
To distinguish 16- from 32-bit applications, Right click on My Computer,
open System Information and click Details on the Memory tab.
4. Once you have identify them, go to spybot, tools, Process List. Order them as you prefer (good examples are alphabetical or by the provider)
5. Choose which applications should not be running at this specific moment and, if and only if, you know them, you can kill the process.
6. Other good advise is to check (Tools> Startup) all the programs in the startup, there you can (also if you know what are you doing) exclude some of them.
7. Finally, run spybot when only the minimum appls are running. That's exactly what I'm doing also when running the anti virus check
Hope this will help you as it did with me.
Becky