Regards spyware - here we go again!!! I just paid £24 for spyzooka and now there are comments that it's average. What is a good one? and what is safe to use?
Eric Howes has kindly created this online resource of those that are unsavoury. It's a bit out of date, but still a valuable resource. A lot of the security blogs around the place are actually fairly out of date, and still reference applications (such as AdAware, or Ewido) that have long been superseded, fallen out of favour, or discontinued.
There are a few Malware removal guides around, that are kept reasonably up to date. The applications referenced within can be relied upon. Some of them (such as Combofix) need a bit of specialist knowledge to use safely. This factor (where relevant) is warned of in the guide. Here are two such guides:
MajorGeeks,
Piriform. (The latter is from one of the forum mods at Ccleaner.)
Here is a page including a (by no means complete) list of forums that can be relied on. There are many others, such as Majorgeeks, Wilders, Castlecops...
And if you trust what I'm writing,
Superantispywareand
MBAM are two state of the art spyware scanners. Both have free versions available. Both have pretty good forum support available for the free versions, a factor that should be looked for when judging the usefulness of a product. In fact, often a browse through a user forum can give a prospective user all the reassurance (or otherwise) needed.
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Here's another useful site, many tools easily referenced/indexed, and linked to their respective homepages. Seems to be regularly updated, too.