Labs

Spyware Doctor 5's clean interface and reasonable price make it an attractive option. As with Spy Sweeper, it provides real-time protection as well as a collection of other levels of protection. For example, it monitors your web browser's settings and startup programs. It can also scan a PC for existing infections. A limited version of this program is available in Google's Google Pack collection of essential utilities.

We were more interested in how it handles incoming spyware. It did quite well in our previous anti-spyware test (Shopper October 2006), although its real-time protection was patchy.

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This time we really put it to the test, throwing many more samples of spyware on to the hard disk of the test system. The result was underwhelming; it found less than half of the threats using its real-time protection.

Manually scanning the remaining downloaded files was useless and discovered no bad files, so we resorted to running an assortment of the spyware to see what happened. Spyware Doctor did notice some of the infections, detecting the system's strange behaviour rather than recognising specific spyware files.

However, after running a small number of these programs, Spyware Doctor stopped working properly and displayed a message that read, "Swdoctor.exe seems to be corrupt!" It is not surprising that purposefully running a handful of spyware will eventually swamp a system, but we'd expect an anti-spyware program to have detected more threats before it got to this stage.

This was one of the least effective tools in this group in terms of discovering spyware before it has a chance to interact with the system. Considering that you can buy Steganos AntiVirus 2007 for the same price and get significantly better protection, Spyware Doctor is poor value.