In the early days of antivirus software, vendors seemed to pride themselves on how brazenly they could advertise the fact that their programs had detected a suspected virus on your PC. Garishly flashing skull-and-crossbones were popular, usually coupled with siren sound effects emitted from your PC speakers.

Needless to say, this soon became very annoying for users and for system administrators, especially when primitive detection algorithms and the lack of an industry-wide database of viruses meant that a lot of the so-called detection wasn't far removed from guesswork, generating lots of false positives and, more worryingly, false negatives.

These days, it's a lot more civilised ? a scanner will gently remind you that it has found a virus and quarantined or deleted it, and will automatically notify your helpdesk. Organisations such as the WildList, at the first web link below, help to keep a semblance of order in the industry.

Unfortunately, current anti-spyware and anti-adware software seems to be at the same stage as those early antivirus programs. The problem is exacerbated by the proliferation of a motley collection of tools, including some malicious ones that are actually disguised spyware installers or do nothing at all (see the second web link below for a recent example of a case in the US).

The products I've tried, including Microsoft's beta offering, seem designed to scare users in much the same way as those old antivirus programs. Microsoft's AntiSpyware is one of the more well-behaved programs, but it still takes great pleasure in throwing many pop-up warnings at you.

But more worrying than the general noisiness of the programs is the lack of a common database of threats. Each vendor is free to classify whatever they like as spyware or adware and put it on their own blacklist.

This was brought home to me recently when an anti-spyware product I was testing decided my HP printer driver update utility was a trojan, and so was the Windows XP Security Centre service. And Google's toolbar was labelled as a malicious browser hijacker.

For a business that simply wants to ensure its systems are free of spyware, this is all bad news. You might find your critical web-based tools and agents are all disabled, or real spyware is ignored. It's a lottery.

We should remember that the anti-spyware industry is still immature. The fact that it provides a hodge-podge mixture of freeware, shareware and commercial software impedes the development of any kind of universal definition or database.

There are some encouraging signs, though ? security software vendor Webroot recently published a report on the state of spyware, and it also does a lot of active research into new threats. Microsoft seems to rely on "neighbourhood watch"-type reporting via it's own SpyNet community.

What we need is for some trusted authority to take the reins and get all the interested parties talking to each other and maybe even working together. Any volunteers?