I'm using Windows XP Pro SP2; Spybot 1.5.2.20, latest detection update 12/03/2008, in Advanced mode.
I uninstalled old versions of Spybot yesterday and installed the newest one, and got all the updates. The machine is fully immunized. If I 'check for problems' with no download directories specified the scan takes about 20 minutes. Last night I tried a scan with my main three download directories specified and Spybot would not finish.
Today I tried again, with /verbose, and with a very small single download directory and it all worked. I then replaced the specification of the one small dir with two medium-szied ones - one about 60MB, the other about 17MB. I left Spybot to do a scan and around an hour and forty minutes later it hadn't finished. The progress information says:
Running bot-check 116781/119472: Please wait
scanning download directories; $4CDCC3D5
- and if there's any more text I can't see it as it is truncated by the message display area. Last night when I had the same problem I eventually used task manager to end the SS&D process. Now, in task manager, SpybotSD.exe is the top %cpu user, typically 92-99%, memory usage is slowly increasing at 66880K, page faults is 233K with a PF
delta of around 18-20, and surprisingly (?) for something meant to be scanning files on disk, I/O reads is not increasing. I wonder if it might eg be unzipping something?
Even if it is actually 'working as designed', the greedy cpu usage and total lack of detail suggesting progress through the folders & files within the download directories is not user-friendly. I presume though that it's not working properly.
It's a pity the /verbose switch doesn't produce any more detail. The log file contains only a few lines from when the scan was started:
14.03.2008 15:23:10 - ##### check started #####
14.03.2008 15:23:10 - ### Version: 1.5.2
14.03.2008 15:23:10 - ### Date: 14/03/2008 15:23:10
14.03.2008 15:23:10 - ##### checking bots #####
- nothing else! Is there some way to get detailed trace info out of the application?