Spy Sweeper has come together with Sophos to produce a fully integrated malware-protection application, and the approach is a good one. You get all the basic malware protection your system needs without the overhead of a full Internet security suite, and Vista users won’t even need to add a firewall. System-memory usage has been tweaked too, making Spy Sweeper far more resource friendly. That single scan does require patience, taking three times as long as the previous standalone spyware scanner in our tests, but you can balance scanning performance against CPU usage easily.

Clarity and simplicity are at the core of the interface. Visual risk-level ratings, clear descriptions and listings of related traces make the quarantine or delete decision easier than ever. The dual-pronged protection works well too, with both spyware detection and blocking matching the standards of its predecessor. Keylogger detection is excellent, although Webroot has set both this and rootkit detection off by default in an apparent effort to reduce scanning times. We urge both Webroot and users to change the defaults.

You should also bear in mind that some of the shields are specific to Internet Explorer, so of no use to Firefox or Opera users. The importance of these shields becomes apparent when you realise the AV protection uses the Sophos on-demand engine only, with no real-time protection for email or IM, as with most standalone AV apps. While system-critical shields will prevent a virus from installing itself, if you’re a Firefox user you don’t get the degree of protection you might expect.

As a Spy Sweeper user, you don’t get a free upgrade either, although there’s a Vista-friendly version of Spy Sweeper 5.3 without the AV for existing subscribers if you already have an AV application. And, ultimately, that’s what we’d recommend to be really safe: sticking with Webroot for spyware and leaving the AV stuff to a best-of-breed standalone client with real-time email protection.