I hope they don't expect anyone to pay for it. If so, that would be like Firestone selling tires with holes, and selling optional patch kits.

Some posters have stated that this is an end user issue...that if people knew what they were doing that they wouldn't get spyware. I disagree. My Windows machines are behind a firewall, with both A/V and firewall software running on each machine. I only use IE for Windows update. I've trained my wife to only use Opera. Yet, about once per month I still find one or two items that Ad-Aware thinks are sypware. Of course, my linux box never has this problem.

People who don't go to those measures of course have much higher spyware problems. Recently a friend's daughter was having problems with an almost new XP Home machine. Ad-Aware found over 1000 instances of spyware.

So, end users can help reduce the risk, but the main thing is MS should produce better software. No excuses based on IE being integrated with the OS are acceptable...that decision was made by MS to legalize "tieing" the application to the OS, and was not in the best interest of customers. They created the problem, so no sympathy.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/289/29894#29894