Following your suggestions to other readers over the past months, I have installed Ad-Aware and Microsoft AntiSpyware onto my home PC running Windows XP with 5 user accounts. I have been running each of these programs regularly each week through my own user account. Recently after running both Ad-Aware and Microsoft AntiSpyware in my user account, I then ran the same scans in the other 4 user accounts only to discover additional threats were found by both programs in each and every other user account on the computer. Scanning each profile using both programs takes several hours so is there another way of scanning, using these two programs, that will check all user accounts in the one scan.

This is a very good question and raises an issue which I haven’t encountered before. In Ad-Aware it is possible to scan multiple user accounts/profiles for threats. You first need to ensure the account you are using to conduct the scan has administrator privileges, otherwise you will be unable to access the data directories of the other user accounts. If your account does not have administrator privileges, login to an administrator account to run the scan. You can check the privileges on your account by opening the User Accounts control panel. Once you are in an administrator account, open Ad-Aware. Click the ‘Scan now’ button. Under the scan mode selection, enable ‘Use custom scanning options’ then click the ‘Customize’ link. In the window that appears, click the ‘Tweak’ button. Expand ‘Scanning Engine’ and make sure that ‘Scan registry for all users instead of current user only’ is enabled. Then, click the ‘Scanning’ button. Click the ‘Select drives & folders to scan’ link. Expand the drive which contains the Documents and Settings directory (which contains all the user profile information) - this will generally be your C: drive. Expand ‘Documents and Settings’. Make sure the directories for all the user accounts are ticked. Click ‘Proceed’ and then click ‘Proceed’ again to return to the main Ad-Aware window. Click ‘Next’ to begin the scan. These settings should be saved, so you shouldn’t need to re-check them each time. However, make sure all subsequent scans use the ‘Use custom scanning options’ scan mode, so the customised settings (i.e. scan the multiple user accounts) are used.

Similar to Ad-Aware, Microsoft AntiSpyware also has the option to scan particular folders. Open Microsoft AntiSpyware and click the link ‘Scan Options’ (which can be found under the big button labelled ‘Run Quick Scan Now’). Select ‘Run a full system scan’ and make sure ‘Scan selected drivers/folders’ and ‘Deep scan folders’ are enabled. Click the ‘Select’¦’ link to open the folders selection. Expand the drive containing your Documents and Settings folders (generally the C: drive) then expand the ‘Documents and Settings’ folder. Make sure the directories for all the user profiles are ticked. Click OK, then click the ‘Run Scan Now’ button.

In both cases, remember these utilities also detect spyware which is running in background processes. Since none of the other profiles are running at the same time, the scanners obviously can only scan for running processes in your active profile (and not the other profiles). While the scanners should detect the underlying files which execute to load these nasty background processes, occasionally the scanner may not detect the underlying files. So it is still a good idea to run the scans in each user profile, even if you can scan multiple profiles from the one administrator account.