Users uninstalling Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 have the option to anonymously submit a reason for doing so, and after a few weeks of these reports, we were able to get a picture of the most common reasons.

The top reasons why people uninstall Spybot-S&D are those three malicious antivirus companies who force their users to uninstall our software for so-called, but never proven, incompatibility issues. Against these, all we can do is continuing down the legal road, and the feedback at least helps us getting more exact numbers.

Among the reasons we can address, the TeaTimer messages were mentioned quite often as too confusing. TeaTimer already knows about half a million regular system entries, and more than a third of a million malware detection patterns - but the remaining ones can still confuse unexperienced users. We've therefore decided to heed this feedback and made the decision dialogs on unknown entries optional in a new TeaTimer version now available as beta.

Of course you do not need to uninstall just to give us feedback - just visit our forum or send us an email if you feel things could be made better!

The probably last maintenance release of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 is finally ready, available starting today on the first mirrors, with more becoming available as they're added. It will also be available through the integrated updater soon after it is online completely.

Among its bugfixes and new features are support for the latest Opera releases, support for Googles new browser Chrome, fixed support for fresh older Firefox installations, improved support for fast user switching while Spybot is running, plus a few more bugfixes.

A preview of Spybot 2.0 will also be available as soon as servers have adjusted to the additional 1.6.2 release load.

We're nearing the end of the year, Spybot-S&D 1.6 is out for about half a year now, and 2.0 is nearing beta. An important part of our 2.0 preparations of course evaluating where we could do better, we dug through a heap of statistics, and wanted so share a nice one with you:

Spybot-S&D 1.6 already improved the scan speed a lot, still, people complain about the time a full system scan takes again. This graph shows a "nice" explanation: the number of detection patterns used to detect malware has doubled since the release of 1.6 in July this year, to 343,003 detection patterns in this weeks update.

The graphs first steep increase can be explained with the addition of detections that needed the new capabilities of the 1.6 engine, and should you wonder about the following valley, that was a point where the new capabilities were used to reduce the amount of patterns needed, without actually reducing the detection range.

Conclusion? We have a massively improved detection range, and we're going to improve the scanning time this costs in 2.0 to counter the negative side (speed) of it.