This is just one of many "gems" at SysInternals.com. That website has a *TON* of *extremely* useful (and often unique) utilities. When I have a really oddball or highly technical task I need to do on my computer, my first stop is SysInternals.com, and they've seldom let me down.
Two of their utilities deserve special mention: FileMon and RegMon.
FileMon logs *every* file access of any kind that your system does (as long as FileMon is running), and this is *fantastic* for tracking down all sorts of issues, including "why is my hard disk chugging when I'm not doing anything", "what initialization files does this application use", "what license file is this app failing to find", "why is my application's file access so damned slow", and so on. Just last week I used it to solve a really oddball problem I was having on my computer -- my Internet Explorer failed to load any ActiveX controls from any website. Using FileMon to compare this computer's activity versus another (working) computer's while accessing ActiveX websites immediately raised a red flag -- this computer was showing activity by a Symantec anti-virus DLL, which I didn't even know I *had* on this system. After uninstalling the "hidden" anti-virus layer, my ActiveX controls began working again.
As another example, a while back I had picked up some malware that kept adding bogus entries to my "hosts" file, causing advertising popups to run rampant. With FileMon, I quickly pinpointed the exact executable which was doing the nasty, and I was able to nuke it.
RegMon is very similar to FileMon, except that it logs all system registry activity instead of file activity. Again, this is extremely handy for a wide number of uses.
I'm surprised no mention was made of Stompsoft's product, "SpywareXterminator" which, incidentally found 843 pests when I first installed it, after PestPatrol only found 5! I'm thinking of dumping Norton AntiVirus next month and go with 'NOD32' touted as one of the best, if not the best. You have to get rid of all your other antivirus programmes for it to work. Anyone else use it and if so, how do you rate it?
bump for later