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Yep, that works for me too, thanks! MalwareBytes is back on my PC.

Strange that I never had this problem before version 1.33 – scans ran without a hitch.

Hans,

I have the same problem; solutions from Malwarebyte’s forum did not repair the situation. Having a thought, I have
disabled my antivirus (in NIS 2009) for 15 minutes: Malwarebyte’s quick scan started, ran and finished perfectly in a little over 4 minutes. (Found nothing, but that was expected.) Switched back the AV – everything is normal.
Worth a try.
Adam

Update: MalwareBytes kept freezing on my PC after the update to version 1.33, so I’ve uninstalled it. I may try it again sometime in the future, but for the moment it’s gone.

See the Ad-Aware Performance Comparison – Lavasoft. They claim to scan 36MB per second. Which would be about 24 – 25 minutes on your 70% full 70GB drive.

Joe

--Joe

. On my 70 Gb drive, about 70% full (a lot of photos and MP3 files, though), I rarely use full scan, but did a couple of days ago, and though I didn’t time them, I would guess the full scan took about 90 minutes for MalwareBytes and about 120 minutes for SpyBot.

My C: drive has just under 40 gig on it, John, and Vista is about half that amount. Don’t misunderstand – I’ve never had any misgivings about the “effectiveness” of AdAware or Spybot. I’ve been using both for some time without any significant problems but the slow times they take to run. About the only thing that either has ever found up until now is “tracking cookies” and I always delete ’em just for the hell of it. But this latest AdAware (see Joe’s thread) has added a new one in a complaint about an Avast file.

See Joe Perez’ thread on AdAware at post 754,005.

In light of this thread about Malwarebytes ( post 753,485 ) and since I’ve used AdAware for a LONG time, I downloaded and installed this latest. The GUI has changed a lot! Doing their quick scan takes only minutes and in my case found only (as usual) a few tracking cooking. So, I wanted to do a deeper scan, on ONE drive to see what happens and how long it takes. Well, their next level now is called a Full Scan which says it scans ALL local drives (including USB ???) and I don’t want to do that just yet. I just want a deep scan of the C: drive. So I went with the Profile Scan. I set the profile to scan only the C: drive and for the life of me, I can’t find if it’s possible to create additional profiles for other drives separately. Anyway, this full scan took just under 35 minutes on my C: drive, which is faster than Manwarebytes but DOES give me pause for concern! It identified an Avast Cleaner file as a “backdoor” and I know that has to be wrong, so I told it to ignore.

Now that I’m finished, I can’t find where the log file is and it no longer shows ANYWHERE on the GUI. I’m a tad disappointed in Lavasoft about this one, other than the decent time for a full drive scan. Waiting for comments from others…

How many Gigs are you running MalwareBytes and Spybot against?

I’m speculating that if you use SpyBot’s “Inoculate” function, it keeps some of the nasties at bay.

Al,
Yes, I know. I was going to add something about the NUMBER of files/folders, especially folders; since having 3000-6000 files in some sub folders is nothing today, but 6000-7000 folders! Seems indeed “nuts” at first glance, but as you very well know, if it’s only one file in one folder, then that’s the result. And yes, it was the number you mentioned in your post before the P.S, then thought my post was long and forgot that.

And yes, I understood that drive space wasn’t your point, but I just wanted to mention that calculating the size with Hard links in the equation is difficult.

Indeed, the scan times seems long. I have (personal) data but not as much as you and several others on the main drives. The differences between the amount of data between people and the differences in the mix of the type of data between people (many zip files, many archived setup programs etc.) make it sometimes hard to compare scan times. Not to mention if some have “tweaked” their scan program etc. But in this case, of course, with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware there aren’t many settings to change, compared to AV, even if one is trying to use Command Line parameters.

And as you said, perhaps, “… if one PAYS for the product, you get to schedule …”.

Or some other extra settings. Just checked, since I knew about some real-time before; saw something about:
-protection module
-schedule daily updates
-schedule daily quick scans

Their forum can be found here: http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/%5B/url%5D

Here is one thread, among perhaps several, about scan times, as a result of the update some weeks ago to ver. 1.32, now we are on 1.33 as you know: It takes longer to quick scan since update.

Well, I changed my mind and ran another full scan on the C: drive while I showered and did other chores. It took just under an hour as it did yesterday. So it looks like it doesn’t “pass over” any files it’s already looked at, at least not in this case.

However, the embarrassing thing is that I’ve never timed AdAware or Spybot, so I don’t know how long they take. I’ve always started one running and left the computer for awhile, so I’ve no idea how Malwarebytes compares in time to run. But I do plan to continue with it and think some more about AdAware and Spybot. Any further observations will be appreciated. Thanks…

You should know that I’m not a hard disk “space” fanatic, especially in today’s world of lower storage cost. So, drive space is not my point. Rather the sheer NUMBER of files that are in the “side-by-side” folders seemed to take the most of Malwarebytes time in deep scanning my system. When I come home this afternoon, I’m going to run another scan on only one drive and see if it runs more quickly than it did yesterday. Maybe it is smart enough to bypass files it has already looked at it they have not changed. I don’t know.

Al,
I haven’t read all of the post and its links at winvistaclub about the WinSxS directory that Joe linked to. Further I should say I’m no Vista user (yet, or what one should say. I’ve helped some with Vista problems etc.), so I don’t have day-to-day hands on experience.

However, I read Michael Beck’s post at Engineering Windows 7 – Disk Space some month ago in November, it is mentioned at the winvistaclub post as Update 2, and I think it explains it well/better, directly from the horse’s mouth (he’s a program manager; core OS deployment feature team). Especially the part about the size. It covers both Vista and Windows 7.

He says, among other things:
[indent]

---

But in reality it doesn’t actually consume as much disk space as it appears when using the built-in tools (DIR and Explorer) to measure disk space used. The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to the physical files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in the WindowsSystem32, and it will be counted twice (or more) when simply looking at the individual directories from Windows Explorer.

---

[/indent]
[…]
[indent]

---

While it’s true that WinSxS does consume some disk space by simply existing, and there are a number of metadata files, folders, manifests, and catalogs in it, it’s significantly smaller than reported. The actual amount of storage consumed varies, but on a typical system it is about 400MB. While that is not small, we think the robustness provided for servicing is a reasonable tradeoff.

---

[/indent]

Hard links was one of the new features in Vista, I don’t have an installation at hand to check now, but have looked at a Windows 7 Beta machine, same there of course.

Further from Beck at E7:
[indent]

---

It’s critical that any path expected by an application appear as a physical file in the file system to support the appropriate loading of the actual file. In this case, the shell is just another application reporting on the files it sees. As a result of this confusion and a desire to reduce disk footprint, many folks have endeavored to just delete this directory to save space.

---

[/indent]

That’s it. The shell, explorer is just another application looking at all those real and hard links, both or more showing the size of the data.

I use Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware together with some other applications similar to John, though I have AVG (i.e. Spybot S&D, ZA).

In my case I only wanted a scanner (another) and no real time, and I replaced Ad-Aware with this one (even though the connection to Sweden with Lavasoft and all that ). I used Ad-Aware up to some 2008 ver. I think, but as some said a bit slower, but for me it was also that they put a running process just for updates; and having processes running on an “on-demand scanner only” just for updates seemed silly. I didn’t look closer on the matter if possible to tweak, so away it went. (Now it seems like Ad-Aware Free in some Anniversary Edition, or perhaps all free, offer basic integrated real-time protection.)

As Hans said, “on the whole it seems a solid product”. I agree. But I have not needed it to remove something. Quick downloads of the updates, though they doesn’t seem to be “incremental”, it downloads a full size file each time (1500 kB something), I don’t complain it takes just some second. Also a really small footprint on the HDD.

It is simple in settings, so compared to anti-virus where one often can set if it should scan inside archives etc, it is two choices as mentioned; all or small (quick), and with that comes of course a limited possibility to improve scan time, not much to do.

Boy, I hope so! I think the next one I do I’ll choose just ONE drive to see how different the time it. The C: drive (XP) took “just” 53 minutes, and the bulk of the time was for the Vista AND Win7 drive.

I can say, since this was a first-time run and I stayed pretty close to watch the progress, that the longest time for all three drives was on the WindowsWinsxs folder which is present in all three operating systems. The whopper is Vista, where that folder has almost 32,000 files in more than 7,000 subfolders. In post 750,043 Joe Perez pointed out this article ( The Secret Of Vista’s Winsxs Folder. ) which pretty conclusively points out that there isn’t anything you can do about this “side-by-side” business.

We’ll see…

PS Laughingly, that Vista bunch above is about 7.3 gig in size and I just recently installed the Win7 beta and ITS version of Winsxs contains about 6 gig of files ALREADY!