MSE & Malwarebytes

[act]

In the course of trying to figure out why Microsoft Essentials -- which had been working okay -- would not work, nor reinstall, after upgrading to Malwarebytes beta from the previous version (which was experiencing update errors), I found out (or did I?) from a program recommended to me (DupKiller) that there are (perhaps) duplicates of hundreds of the files on this machine. (I am hesitant to attempt to DELETE them.)

This, if true, doesn't seem like a good thing.

To make matters even more odd, my desperation REinstall of Malwarebytes showed it already installed ... though it had been "removed" through Add/Remove Programs in XP.

I am now extremely puzzled, have given up on MSE, and have installed Avira (as suggested in one forum post here).

Is it likely (or even possible) that my system (XP Pro on ThinkPad R40) is ... somehow ... now cloned, or something like that? What -- if anything -- should I be looking at/for next? Any guidance/guesses welcome.

Thank you.

[CWB]

as for the "dupkiller" program ...

when deleting "old files" one has to be very careful ... some dupes are ok to have , they act as a sort of backup .

now , if you had (say) 20K legit mp3s that needed weeding out , this program would work ok .

according to the information here : http://download.cnet.com/DupKiller/3000-2248_4-10487318.html#rateit ,

the program and method/act are not for the comp un-hip ... you have to know what you are doing .

also ... seven reviews in total and the last one was in 2008 , the first in 2006 ... hmmm ...

norton (before it was symantec) offered a similar product as part of one of their so-called "comp maintenance" suites .

i used this product ... it had three levels of warning about the safety of removal (just like a traffic light) .

i would stash the dupe files after removal and reboot the machine , after a few days (and all was well) i would permanently delete them .

wanna guess what happened when i went from "green" to "yellow" ... yeppers , the comp choked .

bottom line : if you are not hip , don't do this .

if you want to learn more about the infernal workings of comps/software/OSes , go for it on a non-critical machine .

as for the rest of your problems ...

i believe that there is a specific removal tool for MB .

and as you have a beta version ... perhaps the development crew would be the best to proffer information .