I was thinking of that,which was partly why I was asking if you were having problems with other apps and how your computer was running,etc.
But if you do have Vista Starter Edition,then from what I could find,512 MB of Ram is over the minimum requirements.Minimum is 384 MB ram,recommended is 512 MB,maximum is 1024 MB.That info is under system requirements here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...r/default.mspx
Plus,I was thinking that if not enough ram was part of the problem,you would think Spybot would run slow when scanning also.But 31 minutes isn't too bad of a scan time in normal mode.
Though if shutting down some other processes helps,perhaps you might be on to something.You could try a couple times shutting down less important processes and running Spybot,and see what happens.

I also asked for help,so I'll tell you some suggestions after I go get them.