SDSpybotLab.exe Update News Popup

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nixagan735

New member
A few words of praise: I've been using Spybot for years to fix unloved computers for friends. It's a marvelous program and I'm VERY grateful for it. Thank you!

A few words of criticism: What is the below monstrosity, and how does one get rid of it?

Started seeing this after updating my Spybot Search and Destroy. Clicking the given "Spybot Anti-Beacon 3.5" hyperlink doesn't do anything, nor does clicking much of anything else. After exiting it pops up again after a minute or so.

Side Note: My laptop monitor is 1366x768. The expletive pop up is taller than my screen!

Thanks in Advance!

Qblf64q.png
 
As nixagan735 asked above, how can we get rid of the aggravating pop-up shown in the screen shot above? It appears every time any user account is opened and takes up most of the screen.

Apart from the news aspect, it seems to be trying to pressure the user into buying Spybot Anti-Beacon 3.5. I don't wish to buy Spybot Anti-Beacon 3.5 so I'd be very pleased to know how to disable this pop-up permanently. I can read the news here anyway:

https://www.safer-networking.org/category/news/

Other than the grumbles above, I like Spybot very much and have been using it for many years now, so thank you very much for a very useful program.
 
oh cool, I have signed up into this forum just to create a thread with exactly the same question!

How to disable this annoying popup window without disabling the auto-updates?
 
tashi said:
Hello everyone,

If you haven't done so already please open a support ticket here

Best regards,

tashi
Click to expand...

Thanks but I've already removed it because it spam the popup window even with auto-updates disabled (!). Not so far from a malware behavior...
 
tashi said:
Hello everyone,

If you haven't done so already please open a support ticket here

Best regards,

tashi
Click to expand...
Thank you for your reply. However, I'm not sure why users would need technical support for for what seems to me to be deviant behaviour from the latest version of SSD. How many of us would have to open support tickets before it becomes clear that this annoyance, already described as being "not far from malware behaviour", is due to some fault in the program and is not down to any action or lack of it by the user?

We have 3 PCs here, 1x32-bit and 2x64-bit. On all 3 PCs on every user account (7 altogether), this tiresome pop-up appears whenever any account is accessed. Perhaps there should be some sort of update or patch to this version (2.8) of SSD to resolve the issue.
 
norlin said:
Thanks but I've already removed it because it spam the popup window even with auto-updates disabled (!). Not so far from a malware behavior...
Click to expand...

I also chose to uninstall and I experienced the exact same thing. I'm VERY saddened by what S&D has become.
 
Although I find the pop-up extremely irritating, I won't be uninstalling SSD because of it. SSD is a good program which works well; I have no trouble with updates, immunisation or scanning so I see no point in getting rid of it ~ I'll just grit my teeth and close the pop-up until a way is found to dump this intrusion permanently.

At the time of writing this, there have been 1,551 views of this thread, so it seems that a lot of people are interested in this subject. About time you did something to resolve the issue isn't it Spybot?
 
similarly,

Temporary fix : find the file SDSpybotLab.exe in your install folder and rename to .exe2 for instance


also very disappointed, after years of using Spybot and recommending it to friends I finally decided to purchase a professional licence. Not a Month later and I get bombarded by this abomination of an advert for a product which is already paid for, installed and functioning?

By ways of voting with my feet I shall temporarily remove all current installs of Spybot and Antibeacon on the several private computers I manage until this is resolved.

And the suggestion of opening a 'Tech Support Ticket' when this is clearly a moral failure and not a Software error is unacceptable.

Please make it stop,

Kind regards

Smurf

PS: could you include SDSpybotLab.exe in your telemtetry blocklist for Antibeacon?
 
Thank you for this thread!!!!

I have had same problem on three computers (2 desktop and 1 laptop) since my last update of Spybot. I tried everything, but this morning I saw the advise to change the name of SDSpybotLab.exe. To do so, I performed an File Explorer search for SDSpybotLab.exe. It took a while, but it finally came up with one result. I changed the name to SDSpybotLab.exe.REMOVEtoRESTORE and I expect the problem to be resolved.

I'd prefer a cleaner solution and I am disappointed that Spybot did not thoroughly test how frequently this comes up and that there is no known way to quickly disable it. I bet a lot of people are looking for this thread.

Spybot, please fix this ASAP!

--DATJ
 
Searching for alternatives

Has anyone else noticed the irony of Spybot now acting in a way that we use the product to help prevent?
Safer-Networking replied to my inquiry that they had no intention of ending this practice. I am waiting for a response to my service ticket, but in the meantime, I will seek out an alternative and demand a refund of my unused subscription.
 
Email from Team Spybot re Lab Update

Just received this in response to my complaint:

We apologise for the inconvenience.

We are currently updating this file so that the Spybot Lab will only appear when new news articles are available so that this will no longer constantly appear when updating or opening Spybot.

We hope to include this file with this weeks updates.
 
phbair said:
Just received this in response to my complaint:

We apologise for the inconvenience.

We are currently updating this file so that the Spybot Lab will only appear when new news articles are available so that this will no longer constantly appear when updating or opening Spybot.

We hope to include this file with this weeks updates.
Click to expand...
Thanks. This seems to have happened and resolved the problem ~ fingers crossed! The pop-up appeared when I first opened a user account while I was still running v2.8.67.0, but after updating to v2.8.68.0 late yesterday (Wednesday) the pop-up hasn't been seen on any user account so far. I'll wait until later today to see if it's definitely gone ~ I'll let you all know!
 
We released a new installer that should be able to address the problem discussed in this thread. We would like to thank everyone giving us their opinion and sharing their thoughts about this matter with us. We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope with the changes applied you can enjoy our program again as much as we do. Thank you.
 
(m/f) said:
We released a new installer that should be able to address the problem discussed in this thread. We would like to thank everyone giving us their opinion and sharing their thoughts about this matter with us. We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope with the changes applied you can enjoy our program again as much as we do. Thank you.
Click to expand...
Thank you very much for sorting this out so quickly. I'm pleased to say that we haven't seen the pop-up on either of our laptops or the desktop PC since I updated yesterday. I downloaded v2.8.68 here and allowed the installer to uninstall the previous version, restarted as indicated and finished the installation. It all seems back to normal now and I'm very grateful, as no doubt are others, to all at Team Spybot for their prompt attention in dealing with this issue. I have no doubt that I'll be using this excellent program for a long time to come!
 
I've downloaded the new version and the installer locks up, freezes and won't let me install at all.

spybotsd-2.8.68.0

So I can't proceed to try getting rid of this nasty pop up I've been experiencing since the last update install.

Really disappointed that all of this is happening.

Btw, I had to register in order to post this comment and been a long time user that I never had the need to make a post on this forum all this time.
 
phbair said:
Just received this in response to my complaint:

We are currently updating this file so that the Spybot Lab will only appear when new news articles are available so that this will no longer constantly appear when updating or opening Spybot.
Click to expand...
I got a new news article pop-up yesterday (Monday) and I found it very interesting and informative. I think this is an excellent idea and it keeps Spybot users aware of what's going on with Spybot ~ much better than the previous pop-ups too!
 
The idea of SpybotLab is (and was) to keep you as users informed with the latest news of our products and what we are developing. We know that pop-ups are annoying and thus every news article will only show once now. We will add some more features to SpybotLab so that it will help you better keeping updated. We would like to thank you all for your input and support.
 
Looks like this is still a problem ?

This thread about the SpybotLabs popup was first discussed here in over a month ago, and it sounds like it was fixed in a new install file, but this just started for me within the past week. This is highly annoying. I just renamed the Spybotlabs.exe as someone suggested. Hopefully that takes care of this, but users should not have to rename files as a way to disable an annoying popup. Like others here, I have been a Spybot user for years and never had a complaint or had a need to post on this forum. I agree with others that this is akin to malware that is allowing a program to take control of my PC and display an image that I have not asked to see, and there are no config settings to turn it off. Very disappointed and would like to see this remedied.
 
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