Hi all! Love the program, have used it basically as long as I have used computers, which is longer than I care to admit.

This morning I was loading Spybot on a friend's new Asus Transformer (dual-core notebook/tablet). I sometimes cut corners on my own installs, but wanted to give them the full underbody treatment, so to speak.

I have never created a whitelist before, since my computer is usually filled with questionable articles by this time. In this case I could, so I did. This is the only text I'm given by the unsolicited prompt:


Do you want to speed up your system scan by whitelisting all files?

This should only be done if you have a new Windows setup and have not yet connected to the internet, this is the only way you can be certain you have no malware.


I admit to connecting to the internet to download a web browser and this program. Despite this sin, I am growing increasingly angry at the behavior of this part of the program. It has been over four hours on a modern computer which I would expect to finish a full system scan more quickly. But what is truly aggravating is that I cannot stop this process. I'm sitting here with my friend, who's forced to visit me because this potentially delicate operation will not allow them to leave my house, and I'm wondering why an internal list of safe files stored for future scanning is either so critical or so delicate that it will not let me stop.

If there is some logic behind this process, then there absolutely needs to be a much better explanation on the screen which, after all, prompts you to do this. "Takes many hours" and "cannot be halted or the computer shut down by user" are common phrases used by the industry when a program is about to exhibit such behavior.

Disappointed and waiting to be able to leave my house, but thankful very much for the excellent program anyway!