I installed Spybot. The first time I used it to scan it worked fine.

Today I used it and it never finished scanning. The message on the status bar at the point it stopped was "running bot-check 2957/5834:d2.lop"

The X would not close the box. When I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del the dialog box just showed Spybot Search and Destroy. (It did not say (Not Responding).)

I then tried downloading ad-aware and scanning. I removed mostof the files Ad-aware found.

Then I ran Spybot again and it stopped scanning at the same point.

Anyone have any ideas?

Hmmm .... I ran Spybot on my system last night. It told me there was a data file missing. I ran the "Check for updates" sequence and installed whatever it said, and it ran fine.

That might cure yours if there's a file corrupted. In any case Spybot does "hang" on some files for quite a while as it does its stuff.

Hope that helps!

Good advice Ewood If you can reload the update,then it will overwrite the faulty file.
Have to download to the same location to make this work .Sometimes produces a prompt message, but disregard it OK?
If it still is a NO-GO then uninstall and reinstall the program, This may bring things back to rights?
Alternative program to try if no luck (works in a similar way) is Spywareblaster from
http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareblaster.html

Thanks for the advice. I tried the suggestions -- first I updated it -- then I uninstalled and reinstalled.

I ran it today at about 12:30 -- came back at 8:25 and it was stuck in the same spot -- it shouldn't hang up for 8 hours, should it?

I tried Spywareblaster once and Internet Explorer wouldn't open with it loaded. (Maybe because yahoo is my home page?)

Any further suggestions?

Do you have registry cleanup software? I had the same problem with AdAware, and subsquently Spybot. Running my registry clean up( I use Reg 1st Aid - not free but an excellent, non-obtrusive program)allowed both programs to run to completion.

I have Norton System Works 2001. I believe that has registry clean-up in it. I will try that once I get something else taken care of. I'm posting another question.