Thursday, April 4, 2013

Spybot Versus Family Tree Maker

Spybot is a wonderful free anti-malware tool for your computer. Although Microsoft Security Essential handles email security and some browsing security, it doesn't protect against everything. Spybot helps deal with the rest.

My computer was invaded a couple of months ago by a trojan horse called "FunMoods" that invites itself in as a source of nifty icons with which you can dress up your email. I'm not sure how it got in. Suddenly my Google button was a Funmoods button.  Funmoods would do the Google search and bring back its recommended answers. I couldn't evict it.

The cure for Funmoods was the free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware program. It worked like a charm. It found 57 things to delete. Funmoods was gone. Yay.

And then Malwarebytes started harping about subscribing, and I remembered that long ago on a galaxy of machines far away, I had installed something called Spybot that intercepted malware. So I installed Spybot. See if it would do the job.

And then... the Family Tree Maker on my machine could no longer merge info from online into my family tree. An Ancestry.com support staffer suggested that perhaps an antivirus program was interfering with the process.

So I uninstalled Malwarebytes, a task I had put off. No luck. Could the problem be Spybot?
 
I had to google to find out how to turn Spybot off. Here is how you do it:

In Spybot, click the button that brings up the Advanced Tools list. Click on Settings.
  
In Settings, click on System Services. There are three switches for turning off different functions.  Turn off the top two switches.

And voila - turning off Spybot enables Family Tree Maker.

So... if you have Family Tree Maker and discover you have a virus or trojan that your regular anti-bad stuff program didn't intercept - - try MalwareBytes.

Malwarebytes works with Family Tree Maker.

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