AdWatch--yikes!

Yesterday I installed AdAware. Twice. Lavasoft no longer supports my free copy of AdAware SE, so they urged me to update. When I got to the update screen, they offered me either (1) a free copy of AdAware SE or (2) a free copy of AdAware Plus if I took a free trial product from TrialPay.

It took me a long time, because I didn’t really want any of the free products. I really did want the AdAware Plus because for reasons we do not need to go into here, I no longer had a working copy of VirusScan.

So I downloaded my free copy of AdAware Plus, and I clicked on AdWatch, which was billed as a real time security program, sitting quietly in the background, making note of potential problems.

After running AdAware I started my browser, and AdWatch started nagging. “Iexplore.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name here). “Allow or block?”

“Holy cow!” I said! “I must have a terrible virus problem if AdWatch is bringing it to my attention right away!” But then I concluded that iexplore.exe was probably Internet Explorer, the very application I was trying to run, and I allowed it to continue. There were three questions like that, to which I trepidatiously responded, “Allow.”

AdWatch continued its menacing litany. “Qtask.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name). My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t started any application that began with a “Q.”
“Block,” I commanded.
“Qtask.exe is trying to make changes,” it insisted. I wish the CIA had been so dogged in the summer of 2001.
“Block,” I repeated sternly.
“Qtask is—“ it warned.
“Block.”
“Qtask—“
“Block.”
“Q—“
“Block.”

I didn’t get the second lowest score in my Pascal class for nothing. Eventually I figured that I was embroiled in an infinite recursion.
“Allow,” I said wearily.

Was AdWatch worth it? I looked up the reviews, praising its silent sentry duty. Maybe other users enjoy the security of knowing that AdWatch will slay intruders in their tracks. Maybe others don’t mind micromanaging their computers. I did, and I resented it.

But what was qtask? I looked that up, too. It was a program called QuickTime. Aha! It had something to do with iTunes. Why was it coming up at startup and refusing to be swatted down?

Once I logged on to the sites I needed to visit, AdWatch did not obtrude. But when I started logging off again and closing tabs, AdWatch went wild. At one point I had 29 notifications stacked one above another. AdWatch, I resolved, had to go.

I was a woman on a mission. I went to “add or remove programs,” determined to root out AdWatch forever. But AdWatch and AdAware were so tightly bound together that I could not cleave one from the other. I would have to remove the whole thing and reinstall it, which I eventually did.

I took my speedy revenge on QuickTime, though, and I haven’t missed it yet.