You have to love Ad-aware's tag line: "The morning after pill for the Internet." It's also easy to love the price of the basic version: free. The Plus version can block spyware in real time, while the Professional version has more detailed configuration options—scanning systems across a network, for example. Solid detection and removal abilities are obscured by an awkward interface.

Ad-aware 6's straightforward interface identifies the vendor of the file and the type of attack (for example, data miner) but at times becomes overly modal, limiting your options to too few situation-specific buttons. When looking at scan results, for example, you have little choice but to click on Next and proceed, although you can deselect objects to proceed without removing them.

Ad-aware found a respectable amount of our spyware and removed most of it. On the other hand, although the program claims to remove Trojans and key loggers, it left NetBus and NetObserve intact. And although it claimed to have removed Alexa, the Alexa toolbar was functioning afterwards, apparently still sending back information.