but they didnt produce the same result. malwarebytes didnt detect things that were there. i understand what you are saying about how things are counted, but that doesnt apply here. there were active items that were not detected by malwarebytes. it is not a matter of counting the items in the folder, the folder and its contents were not detected. nor were the exes, or the services, or the scheduled tasks, or the registry entries, or the browser plugins. if malwarebytes detected folder A and removed it and all of its contents and adwcleaner also detected folder A and removed all of its contents then you are correct it does not matter if it just counts the folder, or if it counts the folder and its contents because we got the same results. but that was not the case here. maybe i should clarify the timeline. malwarebytes was run FIRST. after detecting nothing, and removing nothing, adwcleaner was run. it DID detect infected items and DID remove them. My question is WHY didnt malwarebytes find the items. i updated the database before i ran it, i have a paid version and i ran a full scan. so i do not understand why malwarebytes was unable to detect these items.