Hi everyone,

I'm the tech guy for a small real estate office with six desktop systems, all with multiple user profiles (something like seven user profiles on each system). I have an arrangement whereby I give each system a monthy cleanup, including spyware and virus scans, defragmenting, disk cleanup, registry cleanup, and general look-see.

Any scans I do with Ad-Aware and Spybot don't seem to scan within all user profiles (yes, I checked the option to scan in all user profiles, but that only seems to check the registry, not the relevant portions of the hard drive that relate to individual user profiles), so in order to do a proper job, I'm required to do scans in each profile--a process that takes entirely too long.

Is there a way, within UBCD4Win, to accomplish the task of Spybot/Ad-Aware/Registry cleaning/Temp files cleanup of all user profiles without having to login to each profile individually? I've tried several different things, and nothing seems to get it done properly...

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Jeff
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For spybot I'd recommend just enabling the scheduler built into spybot. Make sure advanced mode is selected to get access to the scheduler.

Make sure it reads as follows:

"C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy\SpybotSD.exe" /AUTOUPDATE /AUTOCHECK /AUTOFIX /AUTOCLOSE

This will need to be scheduled with a administrator password to run. This will then enable you to run the scan when other users are logged in. The above will also make sure it automatically updates, when the scheduled task is run.

As for running spybot in PE it works, but it's still not as good as actually running it from the OS. For me the best bet is to schedule spybot to run at least twice a week and then just manually run it when you do your monthly scan just in case something nasty is still present.

As for adaware I can't give any tips.

Everestlabs Spydefense this software is beta but seems very useful and can also be scheduled to run automatically.

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-11-28.htm#1

I'd better add that you need to use the WinXP task scheduler to create the task, if you leave it the spybot one it appears to take out the /autoupdate upon rebooting. I have no idea as to why that's happening.

and further more it's illegal to use adaware for what you are doing. It's only legal for personal private use. In other words in the home by the person who owns the computer.

It's legal if they've paid for the commercial version, though, right? I wouldn't think that Lavasoft would care if I use the version on the UBCD4Win, if they have the commercial version on the HD.

This simply hadn't occurred to me. I'll have to explore further, I suppose.

yes if they have purchased a license that covers all their desktops then it would be legal to use on all of them.

Most do not however.

For those of you want to stay on the legal side of things the dr-web free scanner is legal to use.