I don't blame you for feeling that this response leaves something to be
desired.
I believe it is correct, however.
Do me a favor? Download a trial of Ewido, scan with it, and lets see what
it finds on your system?
The current beta1 product has seen very little change over the course of the
year since it was released. It is largely third-party code which was
purchased by Microsoft. It definitely has limitiations--there are specific
circumstances--in particular, permission settings on registry keys, which can
cause it to malfunction--loop, leak memory, crash.
If you can spot what registry key it is looking at when this happens, a
knowledgable user can go in and modify the permissions on that specfic key
and allow the scan to continue. I'm not clear from the messages in this
thread whether or not that bit of information is visible, nor whether the
posters involved are up to this kind of relatively delicate task.
It is simpler, at this point, when a scan in safe mode also fails, to
suggest that a competent alternative product be tried--this is safer advice
for the users involved, and likely to get the system cleaned sooner.
On the face of it--a working system, with scans able to complete, then a
"crash message" followed by scans not able to complete--this doesn't
necessarily sound like malware. However, some malware does produce bogus
crash or other error messages. An alternative explanation might be disk
corruption, so I suppose that a scandisk run might be a good suggestion.
I'm not sure why I wrote that original reply--it is short, glib, and not
terribly helpful--probably I was on the HTML interface, and in a hurry. But,
yes, Microsoft Antispyware beta1 does have limitations--and if cleaning is
your primary goal, and Microsoft Antispyware is failing to do the job--trying
a different product to get the cleaning accomplished is a valid suggestion.
Microsoft Antispyware provides real-time protection which is well worth
maintaining, even in a situation where it clearly isn't doing the job from a
cleaning perspective.
