Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06, the free version of Lavasoft's $24.95 Ad-Aware SE Plus, is a significant update. It scans faster and offers more detailed scan results and statistics, but it lacks protection against direct attacks.

Its Code Sequence Identification feature attempts to identify new spyware variants before full definitions are available. It now scans all modules of running processes and can unload offending modules on the fly. The free version doesn't have Ad-Aware's Ad-Watch real-time protection module, though. That's not much of a loss, as it did not actually prevent any spyware installations in our testing. It frequently displayed an alarm warning of, for example, a change to the startup configuration, but did not identify these changes as related to a specific threat, and even though we chose to block all such events, the spyware installed regardless. Only Microsoft's free antispyware seemed to have any luck blocking installations.

Ad-Aware is better at removing spyware from your computer. It detected all but one of our sample threats, and removed two-thirds of those it detected. Double-clicking a found item brings up a page of local details, including the item's Threat Assessment Chart (TAC) rating (on a scale from 1 to 10) and a link to more information on Lavasoft's Web site. Ad-Aware saves a very detailed log file of scanning and removals, but the information is so spread out that we found it difficult to interpret. More useful is the Statistics page, which lists all threats the program has found, their TAC rating, and the number of times each item was found, times it was removed, and the date it was most recently found.

Ad-Aware has some interesting advanced capabilities but lacks some features found in most of its competitors. You can set it to perform a full or "smart" scan at start-up, but there's no other scheduling option. Also, you can't restore single items from quarantine; you have to undo the entire scan and then rescan, marking the specific item to be ignored.

Because of its scanning and removal strength, we recommend using the free version of Ad-Aware as an additional cleanup step when your main antispyware program reports trouble.