Kaspersky has seldom appeared in reviews by the popular magazines, simply because it is fairly expensive and Kaspersky has not made a practice of sending "evaluation copies" to the mags to compete in the reviews. The name is familiar to many users, however, because they are very frequently the FIRST to detect, identify, and publish removal and/or fixes for new threats. As SRS notes, they've had little "rep" among casual users, but are exceedingly well respected in the "AV trades." I can't say whether their AntiMalware programs are exceptional; but I've been happy with my other protections so I may have missed recent reviews.

The proliferation of malware programs makes it impossible for any AV program to have a specific "signature" for each of them. Attempting to do it that way would mean that your computer spent all its resources looking for malware and you wouldn't be able to use it for much of anything else. Detection of malware is now as much by monitoring the behavior of suspect files as by just "looking at the bits."

It is very common now for even the best AV programs to be able to detect malware that they can't automatically remove**, or can't remove completely; but once you're notified that something is present, you can go to the AV makers' websites where you are likely to find detailed instructions specific to the particular infection. For a very few infections, removal can be complex enough to justify a special program to remove a single individual infection, and if possible you should get it from the maker of your AV program or from a site recommended by them.

When WinXP was the best thing running (from Microsoft) Spybot S&D and AdAware were useful because they did things that the simpler AV programs of that ancient era didn't bother to do. Full Suite Anti-Malware programs now do it all, and if you have one program that provides adequate protection it's probably best to get rid of them. Even for the specialized things they did, they have not shown up particularly impressively in reviewer ratings for at least a year or so, and "laying on layers" of protections can make the layers bunch up on each other and leave your a!! sticking out and exposed.

IF you're still running WinXP, Spybot and AdAware may still be of some use, but XP is, by current criteria, so full of holes you won't likely be able to tell what junk you've got onboard regardless of what programs you install on it.

Quite a lot of undesirable junk is more rude than dangerous, and the few patches Microsoft continues to provide for WinXP are largely confined to malware that 1) completely prevents your machine from operating or 2) is known to be used for specific criminal purposes or 3) makes your machine a source of infection for others. Clutterware that merely slows you down is not generally considered significant enough to patch for.

** A program that's running CANNOT BE DELETED OR MOVED, and most AntiMalware programs are not able to stop programs loaded at boot. Any removal or quarantine must be done after a Safe Boot that doesn't load the startup files.

John