Hey, Road, that's why I want to see the article. CR does some pretty good comparisons, sometimes. Sometimes you wonder what they were thinking.

I remember a vaccuum comparison in the 80's. They put their stamp of approval on the cheap vaccuum that took out just 50% of the dirt, and diss'd the more expensive machine that got 80% of the dirt. If you made your purchase decision from that, you were condemned to eternal filth.

Why did some of those apps score lower than others. Spybot is the go-to (and free) tool, but they rank it in the middle. Does the automatic updates make the other better? I still run shy of commercial spyware tools, simply because I've heard too many stories, even now, of commercial tools caving to pressure to not treat some things as spyware.