I have a fairly ancient Dell notebook, which has served me well for a number of years when I am on the road. It only has 30GB of memory, but has 1 GB of Ram, and has been a faithful old workhorse, for receiving and sending emails, browsing the internet, doing banking etc.

A couple of months back I found that I when I tried to run Spybot, it seemed to take forever to run - i.e. many, many hours, and never seemed to finish. I once ran it all night, and it finally finished but took over 12 hours! Previously there was no problem.

I tried everything to solve this problem, but in the end gave up and re-formatted the machine. Ran Spy bot - exactly the same problem as before!

Yesterday I tried to run Ad Aware - same problem, 10 hours and counting and it still hasn't finished.

Avira AntiVir virus software runs fine.

Ad Aware used to run fine, even before the reformat, it was only Spybot that I had the problem with. Now both are on the blink, and don't forget that I have re-installed both of them since the reformat.

Apart from this, the computer seems to run OK.

Anyone have any idea what's going on - or is it time to nudge my poor old Dell into retirement and buy one of these feisty young Acer sluts, crammed full of ram and gigs?

There's no way it should take that long. My first guess is 'you have been hijacked'.

You could try to run first the free program CURE IT which might detect the culprit

this will happen to machines that have been hijacked.

if it was a new OS install and it had not been connected to the internet or exposed to a USB drive it maybe means the copy of windows you are using is bad.

I used an original "Dell" Version of Windows XP, but it was connected to the internet to get the updates.

I am now downloading Cure It, and will report back. Ad Aware took 12 hours to scan my machine last night/this morning.