A-squared Free keeps finding 5 cookies on my system and has for months, they can't be in any physical files because I've cleaned all those.

So, does anyone know if and where cookies would be stored in the Windows registry?

Could you let it quarantine them and use Zsoft uninstaller or similar to track where it removes them from?

That's just it I'm not infected with anything so it can't quarantine anything. It constantly finds 5 cookies but doesn't state they're tracking cookies or anything malicious at all, therefore an installation watching program isn't going to help find anything in this case because they're always there.

I don't know if it's a bug in A-squared or not so I'm not gonna go there and start accusing it. I'll wait to see if anyone knows if cookies can be stored in the registry or not, with Internet Explorer installed it wouldn't be a surprise if they could be.

So A-squared doesn't state anything about where those cookies are stored? What does it exactly says about those cookies?

Sounds like a bug to me. A squared I think has a built in report function and they will email you back relatively soon if you use it.(I've reported a few FPs to them in the past and they were pretty good about answering).

I noticed during the scan to get the screenshot that they "may be in HKEY_USERS," but it's zipping through what it's doing so fast I can't be certain.

This is all it shows:



I was thinking of that too, because it did the same thing all those months ago when we both tried it at the same time. I remember I got the 5 phantom cookies and you got the false positives.

Can it be that it means Cookie folders scanned?

This thread on the A-Squared Free forum seems to be about this bug Cookies

So it's a bug after all!
Thanks for that forum link Glenn!

Andavari . . . just a few days ago I downloaded and installed A-Squared Free and thought I'd give it a try. You've obviously been using it for a while now. Other than the cookie problem you've been experiencing, what's you overall impression of this scanner? Does it tend to yield of lot of false-positives? How do you think it compares with SUPERAntiSpyware?

I noticed that A-Squared does "trace" scans. Just exactly what does that mean?

Sorry I didn't notice this post you did!

I really have no so-called impressions of it because:

• It has never detected anything malicious on my system (exactly the same as all other anti-malware applications I've used over seven plus years). Therefore I have no ideal whatsoever how it would clean up an infected PC and if it could properly heal it, etc.
• I only started using it because:
  1. AVG Antispyware makes my system act really, really, really funky by causing some weird slowdown that forces a reboot, thus I wanted an alternative that doesn't cause that behaviour.
  2. Because it has the ability to be used as a right-click scanner from within Windows Explorer without loading and waiting for a whole application to launch, then clicking a scan button, then clicking the folder I want to scan (damned annoying if you ask me). I was doing that for so long with SUPERAntiSpyware Free and even the old free Ad-Aware SE Personal until I had finally gotten sick of doing that (yeah I know, buy a licensed version and stop ya bitchin' busta).

I don't really know what they mean by traces I haven't looked it up or anything. All I'm really using it for is to right click my download folder to do a quick check for malware that my installed antivirus may or may not miss.

I figured out what Traces is when A-squared just now updated. It's basically spyware signatures if going by the updater description is correct.

I just found this on traces. Seems to be a pretty good explanation.