Does CA Anti-Spyware work???

Here is my one word answer for you .....NO. That is one of the world security suites that pc world evaluated. It really just does not detect a lot of threats. Here is the link to the article. You would be better off with norton or bitdefender.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139996/article.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140127/article.html

Try Rogue Remover to get out a lot of false anti spyware and adware scanners, and for vista, you should have windows defender, and it does a fair job.....

First and most important thing to remember about spyware and adware is that the scanners all have their own sets of signature files, and only in this last year or two have they gotten invasive, or agressive in cpu and system resource needs. But the signatures are not as easy to generate, since they don't just give you a simple walk through to manually remove one they just add it in their sig or definition files, so running about 3 different one manually will keep your system cleaner than any single one.

Also, the free scanners, only a few have enough compassion to want you to stay clean, so help them out, Spybot S&D 152, Ad-Aware 2007, and 2008 will be out soon, and Spywareblaster 4, and the new Windows Defender, will help you a lot, all free, you can lock you host file with Spybot S&D, but remember to unlock and not use the tea timer when doing full scans offline from the others to insure good scanning.

The paid versions give you more functionality, better flexability, allow you to zero in on something and scan it good. After you get the feel of them, It's really a good idea to go pro...

As for Anti-virus, I have used them all, e-trust is ok, avg has a couple nice features but its not all that good, aVast updates far more frequently than all the others, and they will normaly have sigs out within an hour of a virus in the wild being found, and the tests I ran last month aVast was clearly ahead the game in every aspect.

For aVast, it too is free for home use, but once you learn it and understand it and what you are doing the pro is a great power above the rest, and I dont use the skins, and the memory scan it does before loading the interface, is an excellent bonus tool to use right before running Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D.

Macaffe used to have an awesome bootable floppy version of their anti-virus, my copy is so old, its just for converstation now days, and I no longer have one thats up to date, I do have some other options, but I do lots of recovery work, people don't seem to realize how important it is to save their files to disc, and protect them, so that my work is easier, just fdisk format and reinstall clean, and teach them for an hour or so how to properly install a program and let them finish loading all their stuff, but too many do not have the time to do either, so I get their pc's to make them run without reinstalling.

I hope this info helps a few people to get going on the right foot, not wasteing money the wrong way, go free but not with counterfit scanners, like antispywaremaster or something, and remember one antivirus program, and one spyware real time, and a couple extra manually run, all update the signature files.....

Enjoy.....