I recently ran into a problem with my FS9 installation where it was taking an unusually large amount of time to boot and an even longer period of time to initialize a created flight. The symptoms were mostly noticed during the latter where it seemed that FS would hang for a long period of time at the "creating scenery objects" step as well as at the "adjusting scenery objects" and "loading traffic" steps. It was taking close to 5 minutes for a created flight to load. I uninstalled FS and then reinstalled it keeping all of my addons intact. This did not resolve the problem. I uninstalled all of my addons (EZscenery, Lago FSE, Flight One's FS Water, and any other smaller addons I could find and once again uninstalled and reinstalled FS9. With FS9 in a super clean state I still had the problem. At this point I suspected a bug had gotten on my PC and I scanned with AdAware, Spybot S & D, and Ewido but nothing that was found and removed seemed to fix the problem. I then scanned with AOL's Antispyware which found something the others hadn't and that was a piece of spyware called "WorldAntispy", a relatively new (Nov 2005) bug. It works like most of the other "let's suck someone into buying our crappy software" pieces of spyware where it generates a pop up saying "Your machine has been infected with Spyware!", providing a link to their website, but since I have a zillion pop up blockers, I never noticed it. After removal of the bug, FS load times were back to what they should be. This is the first spyware bug I've found that affected FS9 so I thought I should pass this along everyone so that, hopefully, it would prevent someone else from uselessly having to rebuild their FS enviroment from the ground up when the problem is, in fact, an intrusion from a piece of spyware.

Scanning for that kind of stuff is, indeed, something we all need to do frequently. And all to often, I at least, forget about doing it. Thanks for the reminder and welcome to the forum(s).Doug

Thanks for the welcome Doug! And yes, I had gotten lax about scanning as well. Too many scans that came back at the end, "No spyware found...." and it ended up biting me. ;-)

The AOL Spyware Protection software is quite impressive. It has found 3 or 4 spywares on my PC that others have not.

I often get suspicious about spyware removals that find stuff nobody else does.Often they're trying to scare you into buying expensive "protection" software by yielding false positives.Can't tell if that's the case here, but be aware that it happens quite a lot.

I would be surprised if what you said wasn't true, however I would also be surprised if a company as large as AOL would be willing take a public relations hit for such a tactic. However, poor decisions do seem to be in vogue these days! Warning noted.I think they believe that in addition to it being a free value added product for the consumer it also helps them as an internet provider by cutting down on complaints, help calls and traffic thru their servers, so they receive a direct benefit as well.I have no affiliation with AOL at all and I also give them credit for Spam reduction. They took the problem seriously and it is now only a very minor irritation to me. No sex emails and very few clearly blatant scam emails show up.

I share your thoughts too Bob.... Spam is cut way down and like you also, the antispyware application has found a few bugs that some others didn't. AOL does have some funky aspects like was said above but there are a few good things sprinkled in. As for me, I'm just happy I don't have to wait 10 minutes anymore till FS is done with it's gyrations ;-)Now I just have to get it back to where it all was before. It's just all so fun rebuilding your enviroment all over again ain't it? Hehehe!

By the way, I wanna wave Hi to my old friend Mr Wenting there who I probably haven't seen in two years or so.... Hi ya old friend!