SpywareBlaster and PowerDesk's Dialog Helper

I think I may have stumbled upon a bug in the latest version of SpywareBlaster.

I use a file manager called PowerDesk. It has a handy feature which I use all the time called the Dialog Helper. When you click on the Open command under the File menu, the Open box appears with two small icons in the title bar. If you click on one icon a drop-down list appears of the twenty most recent files you have accessed in that application. A second icon lets you see a list of the last twenty folders you have accessed. An additional feature of this tool is that it allows you to resize the Open box so that when it is not functioning, the first tip-off is that this box suddenly appears much smaller than I normally have it set at.

I installed the most recent version of SpywareBlaster about a month ago. At the time, I did not notice anything untoward happen. But yesterday, I remembered that I had noticed that this newest version has a Flash Killer feature which I decided to try out.

Well, the flash killer worked perfectly, but moments after I had used it, I went to open notepad and immediately noticed that my Dialog Helper icons had disappeared. While I found it was possible to load it manually, each time I rebooted, it would again disappear, even though it continued to be listed in my msconfig Startup Group. No amount of taking it out of the Startup list and putting it back in would make it load properly at bootup. In other words, if I wanted to continue using it, I would have to load it manually each and every time I boot up.

Finally my only option was to see if restoring the registry would bring it back to loading itself correctly at bootup. This last was successful.

However, this evening I decided to post a query about this in your Support Forum. In order to do so, I opened SpywareBlaster and clicked on the home page link. Even though this time I did NOT click on anything in the program, no sooner than it finished loading, I again noticed that the Dialog Helper icons disappeared once again.

So a second time, I went through a lengthy process of trying to get the thing back, and again, the only action that restored it to normal loading at Startup was to restore my registry.

I have no clue what might be happening here. I only know that even just opening the SpywareBlaster program somehow effects the proper loading of PowerDesk's Dialog Helper, and nothing short of restoring the registry will put matters back to where they ought to be again.

I cannot describe to you competently how Dialog Helper does its thing. I know that under the Registry key HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Ontrack\PowerDesk\CurrentVersion\DlgFile\ there is a list of all the applications I have set Dialog Helper to track, and in the right-hand pane are listed twenty "History" keys, so that in effect, PowerDesk keeps its own MRU listings in the Registry for the applications it is set up to track. However what might be interfering with its functioning correctly immediately after my opening the SpywareBlaster program is completely beyond me.

At this point I'm just not too keen on going through another Registry restore to set things right with my Dialog Helper, so I'm going to avoid opening SpywareBlaster for the time being. I do still have the setup file for an earlier version saved, so I may just reinstall that version until I can figure out what is going on here. But any input as to why SpywareBlaster might be effecting the loading of PowerDesk's Dialog Helper by readers who use VCOM's file manager would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Trist