Spy Remover detected spyware and adware unremarkably and was hampered by false positives and an awkward interface.

The program missed EasyInstall, New.net, PromulGate, and SideStep and ignored the key loggers (only McAfee caught those) and the Trojan horse NetBus, which all the apps overlooked. Strangely, it also identified two Registry keys as being Gator's on a Gator-free system, the only case of false positives we saw. Spy Remover also left behind many spyware fragments.

We had bad luck with Spy Remover's backup process, which lets the user save items for later restoration before deleting them from the system. In the middle of the backup we got an error message that might have been helpful to the program's authors but simply told us that the backup didn't work. This happened on both of our test configurations. We attempted unsuccessfully to contact RizalSoftware.

Additionally, we wish that Spy Remover had a better way to deal with files that can't be removed before rebooting. Currently, you get a separate message box for each such element, one at a time. Removal halts until you click on OK, so you have to stand by during the entire scan, clicking dozens if not hundreds of boxes, a complaint that's true of PestPatrol as well. A checklist at the end of the process would have been a more elegant solution.