Various reports from the Internet and from our own testing seem to indicate that there is a problem between Internet Explorer 8 and the immunization feature of Spybot - Search & Destroy causing a slow startup of IE 8.

Seeing all those different opinions floating around, we want to clarify what the Immunization feature does. It is one level of our protection that does protect you even if Spybot-S&D is completely shut down. This is possible by using the browsers own lists for blocked sites, by filling them with a huge list of bad sites known to us. And Internet Explorer, starting with version 8, seems to have problems with huge amounts of sites added there.

Critics say that this kind of protection is not that good because recent malware sometimes uses new servers every day even, but then, this is just one layer of our protection. Our Internet Explorer plugin is better able to deal with these, but we feel that's not the point.

Quality assurance is a very important factor of software development, and unoptimized list handling is the probable cause for most performance issues. Whenever software does support lists of data that are not fixed in size, but where the size, like in this case, is open to the user, software tests should include performance tests on huge amounts of data. And usually, it's really just choosing a better algorithm for searches, for example.

Granted, at times a release is pressing and testing gets neglected and not as detailed as it should be - it never is. We know that quite well ourselves: just a few months ago we did slow down IE through our own plugin because we did not expect users to have tens of thousands of cookies at the same time. Did we expect users to cut down on their cookies? No. If you offer a feature, like Microsoft offers to put websites into a Restricted Zone, then please try to support in all ways the users might use it.

Our last news entry informed you about our efforts to address the most important issues our users have quickly. The new TeaTimer update mentioned back then is in todays updates, just update as usually.

More feedback we have analyzed so far includes Spybot-S&D starting up a scan on system start all the time on some machines, which we try to address with todays updates from the detection database side, reducing the chance that detections need a scan on reboot, and for which we have a beta version (SpybotSD.exe and advcheck.dll, note these files are for experienced users only and do not contain a full Spybot-S&D installation package) for affected people to help gathering more details (new logfile named Run Entry History.txt).

When letting Spybot-S&D look for updates on program start on Vista, some users experience the message Please select some updates first, which can be a bit confusing. A beta SDUpdate.exe is now available for that problem.

The installer file that is downloaded to the desktop during a main update (to allow you to see the file and store it elsewhere if you want) is now named setup-spybotsd162.exe instead of spybotsd162.exe to avoid confusion with the regular Spybot... start link.

We'll continue to analyze feedback for ways to improve of course.

Users uninstalling Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 have the option to anonymously submit a reason for doing so, and after a few weeks of these reports, we were able to get a picture of the most common reasons.

The top reasons why people uninstall Spybot-S&D are those three malicious antivirus companies who force their users to uninstall our software for so-called, but never proven, incompatibility issues. Against these, all we can do is continuing down the legal road, and the feedback at least helps us getting more exact numbers.

Among the reasons we can address, the TeaTimer messages were mentioned quite often as too confusing. TeaTimer already knows about half a million regular system entries, and more than a third of a million malware detection patterns - but the remaining ones can still confuse unexperienced users. We've therefore decided to heed this feedback and made the decision dialogs on unknown entries optional in a new TeaTimer version now available as beta.

Of course you do not need to uninstall just to give us feedback - just visit our forum or send us an email if you feel things could be made better!