Could you tell me exactly what all these different programs are?? I've got "Complete Registry Cleaner", "Registry Mechanic", "Spybot", "Ad Aware", "Hijack This", "Stinger", CCleaner", "AVG", and then there's the Cleanup and Defragment tools, and Error Checker. I do all these fairly regularly, and they all seem to find different things.

How often should I run these programs, and in what order??

Jen

Ok, let's see if I can help you here...

Stinger is only for a select group of viruses (I think 32 last I checked), so it is largely a waste of time unless you happen to have one of those selected.

Hijackthis is not something that you should really be messing with at all, unless you have someone who is familiar with the output guiding you. HJT is not an automated tool. It only fixes what you tell it to, and if you tell it the wrong thing, you can really mess up your system. Bad.

Dump the registry cleaning tools... The only times that I have ever used them, they caused huge problems. They work basically by "guessing" what needs to be fixed. It is an educated guess, but they make mistakes, and sometimes they are critical mistakes. I'm sure some people swear by them. I don't.

I only run Spybot adnd Adware maybe once or twice a month. I have Adaware's active protection enabled. I also don't use CCleaner. I have never had any reason to. I have a batch file that cleans my temp folders.

Just an AV is not enough. I have Regprot watching my registry, I have my AV running, I have Agnitum running, all of my updates, SpywareBlaster, and my browser is very locked down.

If you have adequte and layered protections in place, then you shouldn't need to run any of the other tools except for when you suspect there may be a problem. I have enough on my system to catch everything I have run across so far, so I don't worry too much about it.