SpywareBlaster 3.1

[jstnomega]

Is there a YEA or NAY consensus around here re this piece of freeware?

On this machine running W's 98SE, I will need to do the vbrun60sp5.exe 'upgrade' & donwanna/fear-to-bother w/it if not worth the program benefits vs possible hooha w/an otherwise currently stable OS install. TIA.

[DuaneB]

I use it, like it and haven't had any problems with it.

[brewster]

Great tool.... I also use Adaware 6.
Never had any problems with either.

[General Winters]

Using Win98 FE

I have always regarded it as one of the default programs that you should always be using .

Firewall (freeware is fine), antivirus (freeware or paid ,anything but Norton ), spywareblaster, spybot and ad-aware. The basic programs I always encourage my friends to use.

Combined with a good HOSTS file and IE-Spyad , occasional scans at an online antivirus scanner , an anti trojan tool or two , CWShredder and Hijackthis , about the minimum needed to brave the internet these days !

[HAN]

IMO, if one is going to use MS's Internet Explorer, SpywareBlaster is very important. It helps to protect against known bad ActiveX downloads. And the best thing of all is that it does it without running as an active process (so it doesn't use up any critical RAM resources. (SWB also adds a banned site list that runs with no resource usage too.)

And even if you use a browser that doesn't use ActiveX (such as Firefox or Mozilla), SWB's banned site protection still helps to keep you from troubles.

I've used SWB on several machines and had zero issues. It works great. Just a well designed and executed product.

[jstnomega]

Done, done & done. Looks good & is very user friendly. So many products available, it's hard to stay well-informed re the latest & greatest. Thx for all the feedback.

[P3-450]

Just to add my opinion, after a reinstall of windows Spyware blaster is one of the first programs i install along with the above mentioned, and IMO is a must for any system.

[Ildiko]

I kept reading about it from other members and downloaded it myself a couple of months ago. A great program. No problems.

[Chercat]

Ok, I have been reading a lot of positive things about Spywareblaster too and am running 98SE .

Just curious - what is a vbrun60sp5.exe 'upgrade' ?

[Tuttle]

Programs written in Visual Basic require something called the VB Runtime to be installed on a machine before they'll work -- it's a set of common underlying functions which all VB apps rely on, so shipping it separately keeps the size of individual VB apps down. VBRUN60SP5.EXE is the runtime for stuff written in Visual Basic 6 with service pack 5.

[Chercat]

Thanks for the info -
another dumb question - I recently upgraded to IE 6 and have all the service packs installed - will the vb run time already have been installed via that means ? Thanks again .

[Welshjim]

chercat--Run a Find for VBRUN60SP5.EXE . If it is on your hard drive, you got it. If not you can get it here.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/runtimes.asp

[jstnomega]

Originally posted by Chercat
Ok, I have been reading a lot of positive things about Spywareblaster too and am running 98SE .

Just curious - what is a vbrun60sp5.exe 'upgrade' ?

What I learned at the MS KB in exploring that issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...93&Product=w98

Msvbvm50.dll is the Visual Basic Virtual Machine and is the required run- time library for Visual Basic 5.0 applications. The version of Msvbvm50.dll that is included in Windows 98 is 05.00.4319, which is the same version included in Visual Basic 5.0 Service Pack 2 and Visual Studio 97 Service Pack 3.

Don't know why it wasn't on my machine, but it wasn't. The SpywareBlaster d/l page provides a link to the required file & is what I used to acquire it - a self-extracting executable that installs I know not where. (Checking, I see the MSVBVM60.DLL is in c:\windows\system, but I sure didn't know to put it there.) My install error message was that I was missing MSVBVM60.DLL. Installing the vbrun60sp5.exe 'upgrade' brought w/it the above .dll file/library I was missing. Further, when I went looking for just MSVBVM60.DLL, it was easily found, but when executed, I was asked where I wanted to install it. Me clueless, so the link on the SpywareBlaster page saved me some headache in guessing where it should go.

[Chercat]

Ok, I just downloaded Spyblaster 3.1 and checked enable all internet protection.

I checked for the VB file and don't see it , but I was not prompted to run . install anything when I DL'd . I am running IE 6 with all updates . I assume everything is ok or I would have gotten a message from spywareblaster when I tried to install?

I have a cable modem and when I conmtol ,. alt, delete, it shows that I am running Explorer . Is this IE 6? I saw some posts that it might be Windows Explorer ????
At times , I see both Iexplore and Explorer showing up -
As I said , I am running 98SE .
Thanks .