Hello. I haven't used Spybot for a few years, and I have a few general questions about the latest version.

1) What are the "Use source Whitelists", "Use entry black- and whitelists" and "Paranoid mode" options? The helpfile doesn't really explain.

2) When I first installed Spybot a couple of months ago, the TeaTimer would ask me to allow (or not) certain changes. For the first few days, it told me about lots of things, but since then, it has been completely silent. If I check the log, it shows that it has allowed everything, based on either "blacklist", "whitelist" or "user decision". This may have something to do with 1), but I haven't changed any of those options.

3) Whenever I check for updates they are always roughly (exactly?) the same size (5MB and ~800KB). This is either an incredible coincidence, or (more likely) it would suggest the entire database is being downloaded every time Spybot updates. What would cause this to happen? I have known it happen with other programs when the database has become corrupt. I'd like to sort this out, as I check for updates every couple of days, and although Avira usually takes less than a minute, Spybot takes 1/2 an hour to update.

4) Finally, when I doubleclick the icon in the systray, Spybot doesn't load. If I right-click and choose to run Spybot, a small loading window will appear and after a few seconds, Spybot will open. If I open Process Explorer and then doubleclick the icon, I can see SpybotSD.exe (sometimes two) does open for a split-second, but then closes immediately.

I have a couple of other questions, but I think it would be more appropriate to ask them in a dedicated thread.

Thank you for reading, and, of course, thanks for a very worthwhile program.

PS: I don't know how you do it, but your website (safer-networking.org) is lightning fast - every page loads in under a couple of seconds. I'm on dial-up and the web hasn't felt this fast in years.