Spybot & Spy Sweeper

[tashi]

Hello.

Even when nothing is open on the taskbar, something is still trying to get at these sites and Spysweeper keeps telling me about it.

Have you contacted SpySweeper about this, as it is their program giving the alerts since you installed and uninstalled Spybot-S&D.

[AnimeFollower]

Does it REALLY matter if they have been informed or not? really?

Because according to Elidon and myself, all of this happened after Spybot was updated to 1.5.2. And I can verify with my firewall that SOMETHING is going out there trying to connect to all of these "blocked" sites.

What I really want to know is how do I get my machine to stop doing this. Do I do a windows restore to a week ago? Is there something that can find and get rid of this "whatever-it-is" that is causing this?

I do not know if someone got to one of your mirror sites and screwed around with your updates and put in some evil software and right now, I don't care. You can track down the vicious people that did this, detective. Right now, I just want to know how to get my machine to stop doing this.

And turning off Spy Sweeper is not the answer because all that does is turn off the "indicator" that something is wrong.

I want to SOLVE the problem, NOT disable all the things that tell me there is a problem.

So, please, help me out here.

Thank You.

[Yodama]

Spy Sweeper has a feature in which it makes DNS queries for every single entry in the hosts file. That means if you apply a hosts file, like the Spybot S&D hosts immunization or the MVPS hosts file, Spy Sweeper will check every entry for a valid IP address.
Host file immunization was also part of Spybot S&D 1.4 but was availble in advanced mode only, since Spybot S&D 1.5 it is part of the regular Immunization. It is usally at the bottom of the Immunization screen, listed as Global (Hosts). Try undoing this item and see what Spy Sweeper does. Immunize this again and see if the warnings of Spy Sweeper reappear, if so you may want to upgrade your version of Spy Sweeper, the current version (5.5) does not give warnings when it makes the DNS queries.
If you have any more questions about this issue please also post a screenshot of the warning.

[snoweagle]

Spybot v1.5.2.20 and Spysweeper v5.5.7.124
I have run both programs for several years without a problem. However since upgrading to Spybot 1.5 from1.4 I also saw numerous alerts from Spysweeper. I am no expert but it appears that the new Global host file in Spybot is seen by Spysweeper and is checked against the DNS and possibly added to Spysweepers data base. I maintain several family computers and have seen this on all of them. Spysweeper eventually checks them all and stops the alerts. The most recent update of Spybot generated one more check by Spysweeper. I have not seen any other issues to date. Hope this helps.

[normana]

Its the HOSTS file, I found Spybot adds nearly 8000 entries to the HOSTS file, and SpySweeper works its way through that file one entry at a time. I've cleaned out the HOSTS file, and if anything wants to update it now, let SS BLOCK the attempt. It took nearly 2 hours for my PC to work through the list. I would prefer SS's checking all the time, than Spybots occasional runs!