Is there any reason to answer a post that's written with such bile? Well, I'll try it anyway
The last time I checked, my antivirus took about 4 hours to scan my full system, while Spybot-S&D did its part in 10 minutes. I would not call that slow.
If you take a look at the website, the detection database is updated once a week. Not sure why you call that outdated. If you would prefer to pay 49.90 a year for Spybot, we could probably offer you daily updates, until then, I would recommend you persuade people to donate if you want improvements
As for the interface, if you visit the news section, you'll notice links to our
Spybot-S&D 2.0 blog about various user interface issues recently. From a usability standpoint though, I haven't seen anything much less-clumsy so far ("clumsy" seen from a technical standpoint), just more-colorful-more-custom-graphics-more-skin-engines to waste your memory. Agreed, I wouldn't call our interface "nice" on the other side, but you seem to be one of those people who need a new different looking version every year because you could not believe in changes under the hood otherwise.
And if most respected A/V products would really catch "all" that stuff... well, why do they still need this improper competition of
forcing customers to uninstall Spybot-S&D before their product can get installed? Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Kaspersky have 90% market share combined and may be regarded as "respectable" by many, but they all share enough fear to risk legal action by doing/having done improper competition without being able to name a single compatibility issue as a technical reason. If you use one of those, your money supports the same greedy business guys who prefer shareholders over customers and steal our donators through illegal actions. Big money buys a lot of "respectability" of course; read for example
here on how these AV companies really think about your privacy.
If you find the definition database too small, you're welcome to participate, just take a look at our OpenSBI subforum. Which other respectable product is open source, which other respectable product goes as far as opening its definition database with full documentation and tools?
Or take a look at how many other companies have suddenly seen Enigma Software Groups spyware as "hey it's not spyware at all" after receiving legal letters from them. Your respectable Symantec among them. Do they catch "all"? No, just those where they have no trouble with. If anyone comes along threating with legal consequences, they withdraw, may it be spyware or not.
You can entrust them your privacy if you want - I wouldn't
Maybe you used any magazines test result to determine how bad the detection or removal quality is? Well, ask any AV/AS company and they'll tell you how useless these tests are. Even magazine journalists will tell you that if its not in print. Next to the usual bribery where you're asked to by a nice two page ad since that would "support" your product in an upcoming issue with a review, or careless testers just getting test samples from a single company (we experience both regularly), it's a simple truth that the active vs inactive sample scanning makes nearly all tests useless, because to find all inactive samples, every AV/AS product would need days instead of hours for scanning, but testing active samples would need months to perform a product comparison, and that in itself would make results outdated.
Are you by chance a reader of a certain German magazine that tested version 1.5.2 with an outdated database (at least a third smaller than the one at the time the magazine was printed - you can guess how outdated that was - a perfect example of bad tests) that printed something about "1-22% detection rate"?
And finally, just this past week we received the softwareload.de (by Deutsche Telekom) "Software of the Year 2008" freeware award. First prize. Doubt that would've happened if Spybot-S&D was really that bad.
