By Andy Machesta
I think all this negative feedback about Microsoft and Claria isnt justified at all .Ive tested this myself and MS Antispy still make it very clear that Claria is Adware.It has changed them to ignore when the scan finishes but thats the only difference, it still detects claria and the option to ignore can easily be changed to remove.

I have loads of protection products installed and it was only MS Antispy that gave me repeated warnings that i was installing Adware on my system.Spysweeper and Spyware guard even though the real time protection is enabled both failed to notice the changes when i installed Claria.

It was only after the installation finished and i rebooted to let the changes take effect that spy sweeper then noticed Claria on my system then gave a warning ,Id allowed the changes on 3 MS Antispy alert pop-ups and
then it even gave another warning when i rebooted that Claria was trying to run on my pc which made it 4
warnings from MS.

I downloaded and run CPU Rocket which is one of Claria's many programs .Straight away i received Red Alert Popups from MS Antispy for each part of the Adware that was installing (Claria-Gain,Claria-Gain-rickler,Claria-
Dashbar)

Heres the Alert for Claria.Gain.Trickler

WARNING : MS Antispy Alert

MS Antispy has detected the threat Claria.Gain.Trickler trying to install a start up file on your computer. If you would like to allow Claria.Gain.Trickler to install the start up file click the 'Allow' Button below.

Name : Claria.Gain.Trickler
Type : Adware
Threat Level : Moderate
Author : Claria Corporation(Formerly known as Gator Corp)

Advise : Moderate risk items have some potential for adverse effects,but may be part of a wanted service, Users may decide to ignore such programs after review.

Even after pressing allow on all the pop up alert windows i then rebooted to make sure the install was complete and then got another warning from MS Antispy when i rebooted saying

Allow threat to run ?

Are you sure you would like to allow the threat Claria.Gain to run on your system?

Looking at the scan results MS Antispy are doing alot better than some of the other well known removers

MS Antispy - 3185 Traces of Adware Claria
Spysweeper - 809 Traces
Adaware SE - 52 total references to Claria
Spybot     - 20 Claria files detected

To be fair to Ad-Aware and Spybot they mostly only detected the folders and not the files inside the folders
but removing the folders probably would of removed most of the files that the other scanners detected .

It was very easy to clean up the pc just by uninstalling CPU Rocket ,After i removed that and rebooted MS Antispy detected 30 traces in the registry in the classes folder and software folder for Gator related items which i removed and that was the end of Claria so i appreciate why MS Antispy are not regarding this as a big problem.

It still made it very clear i was installing Adware and gave repeated warnings which none of my other protection products did except spysweeper but it was already installed on my system by then.

Hope this helps people see Microsofts Antispy is still removing Claria and in my opinion the amount of traces
found by MS Antispy makes the other removers look really bad considering MS is still in the beta testing stage and doesnt cost anything.

Regards
Andy