Ah yeah I remember those. I also vaguely remember Adaware turning to garbage near the end of that.

Spybot has also been subsumed into some bloated "security center" type software. As far as I know there's nothing out there that does as efficient a job at hosts-level blocking as Spybot did back in the day.

I remember Spybot, it saved me with so many customers when I worked at a small shop in Hawaii as a teenager. Magical time.

Our stack was Spybot, web something, it was yellow, and Eset Nod32

Those three got almost everything possible at the time

I remember having to run a tool that deleted then replaced the winsock registry entries on the machine with the default ones from XP to fix infections. Even if you got the binary files with spybot you’d still have a broken winsock half the time.

Those were the days of the amazing Royale theme for XP… awesome theme.

Malwarebytes lifetime license, still works till this day and no longer available for purchase, love it!

Eset Nod32 was easily the best. it used the least system resources of them all, by far. and was really tweakable, similar to uMatrix and uBlock Origin

Webroot Spy Sweeper

Yes!

Yep adaware, and spybot, circa 2005 and a bit earlier were the tools that removed plugin bars and more.

Takes me back, can't believe it was forever ago.