Another program that scans free, but needs payment to fix anything, Bulletproof Soft Spyware Remover also rejoices in an interface that, by default, features crawling spiders, presumably to make you think about spyware.

It listed 1,444 items found on our test PC, by counting every cookie, file and Registry entry separately, rather than grouping them with the infestation they related to.

In terms of the number of things found, it was around average, though the presentation of results lacked clarity and simply gave an overview of the class of threats, rather than threat-specific details.

There’s a separate area in which things like browser ‘helpers’ are listed, which isn’t immediately obvious, nor is the separate hijack scanning tool. Unless you’re fairly sure you know which Registry keys or toolbars you want to keep, both have the potential to confuse, rather than help users, and we’d prefer to see this side
of things better automated and with more help.

Scanning performance in detailed mode was quite slow, but didn’t find anything more than a quick scan, and removal still left us with pop-up ads, though the home page was restored to its default following an attempt to hijack it by spyware that wasn’t removed.