This has been reported many times before in this
newsgroup.
The scheduled scan feature is buggy, very buggy!
Some people have reported that on some system it doesn't
work at all, while on others the scans are run 2 hours
late! Then some people have reported it has never worked
on any system they have tried it on. Now that's what I
call BUGGY!! The time that I've seen the most people
have a problem with is 5 AM, changing this time might be
a temporary workaround. But I wouldn't hold my breath,
because this is only a beta version and Microsoft has to
rework the code from the original version that Giant
Company created, which is a likely source of many of
these bugs (some part of new code competing with another,
older part that hasn't been cleaned up, or eliminated
from the source code). Although, I had mine set to 12
AM, and it ran daily. Unfortuneately it slowed the
system to an absolute crawl, so I turned the feature off,
and I now manually run scans.
My recommendation is to keep Real-time Protection turned
on and manually scan your system daily, at least until
this bug is fixed (probably in Beta2, likely around the
end of July).
As for autoupdating, I haven't seen this type of problem
with this in the newsgroup, although there are many other
problems with updating (usually a problem with the
Internet connection "unavailable"). I manually update my
definitions. If your definitions are set to 5727 (found
at Help > About Microsoft AntiSpyware...), then you are
up-to-date. When I had mine set to automatically update,
it ran in the background, and I never noticed
it "updating," but it in fact was doing so. You might
need to reboot the system, or log out and log back into
your account to see the updated definitions in the About
dialog box.
Hope this clears up the confussion with autoupdating, and
the problem your are experiencing with the buggy, or
should I say very buggy scheduled scanning feature.
Alan
