Spyware Warrior

[springer]

I'm fairly cautious about clean-up software that involves registries.

I came across this one yesterday, did some research, and then downloaded and tried.

CCleaner.

It immediately found literally megs of junk, mostly leftovers from uninstalled programs...including some leftover spyware stuff like Hotbar.

It's one of Major Geeks "picks"...

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4191.html

Also at...

http://www.download.com/CCleaner/3000-2144-10315545.html?tag=lst-0-1

Home site is at...

http://www.ccleaner.com

It cleans up all traces of your travels on the net, including MRUs, temp internet files, cookies, temp files, etc.

And it will wipe "index.dat" files.

There's an "Issues" application that looks for problems. Rather than let it list each type all at once...which in my case provided a tad lengthy checklist...I handled this by searching one category at a time, creating a backup for it, and then dealing. After each run, I went through and engaged my software to see if there were any problems. Theory being, if there was a problem created, I would know which category of fixes would need to be re-merged. No problems caused that I can find so far.

I've used Registry Clean, and I even bought Registry Mechanic recently.

IMHO, this one outperforms both rather significantly.

That said, do your own DD, and proceed according to your own comfort level.
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If in doubt, don't!

[springer]

About "index.dat" files...

Here's a link that provides info on precisely what this service, and these files are all about...

http://www.acesoft.net/delete_index.dat_files.htm

I disabled this service long ago.

Here's a very useful link to a website that provides a wealth of information on setting "services" for safer operation, for Win2K and XP.

http://www.blackviper.com/

Note: CClean, in my case, has not deleted the 4 "index.dat" files I located in my computer. This, I believe, is because I have this service disabled. If you decide to use CCleaner, you might want to allow it to clean this for you first...which requires a reboot...before disabling this built-in function of Windows.

It occurs to me that...and please correct me if I am wrong about this...a trojan or spyware program could copy information within these files, which apparently record everywhere you've ever been on the net, and relay it back to its source.

FWIW.
_________________
If in doubt, don't!

[Shane]

Index.dat files are not related to the Indexing service. Index.dat files will always be recreated, if deleted - I imagine for as long as Internet Explorer exists on the machine in question. And removing IE is not an (viable) option on Win ME or later.

Apart from by viewing them in a text editor, a guide to whether Index.dat files have been "cleaned" or not is their size. Take a look at their sizes before and after.

One convenient way to check Index.dat files is with Spider116: http://www.fsm.nl/ward/
but don't bother trying to delete the files with Spider116, it won't work, it's only useful for searching for, and as a viewer of, them.

The best way to avoid accumulating information in Index.dat files is to turn off autocomplete and history in Internet Explorer and use an advanced cookie handling method such as https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource5.htm#files. This way the Index.dat files will always exist, but be essentially empty.

Also use MRUBlaster: http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/mrublaster.html and/or EmptyTempFolders: http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp/

[springer]

_________________
If in doubt, don't!