Like me, you may have experienced some issues with that great little program Ad-Aware 7. Many users, including I, complained about the unnecessary memory usage on the free version when it was simply running in the background. And if you think it was easy turning this thing off - Think Again. It wasn't and I tried several 'workarounds' and only the third suggestion managed to kill the damn thing. Well, I take my hat off to the boys at Lavasoft because they have listened and today they bought a new version and I have just tested it and the memory usage has been throttled back to a sensible level.

Here's a quote from Lavasoft:-

Ad-Aware Update: 7.0.2.3
by Tobias on September 26th, 2007 in Lavasoft Products and Solutions, Developer Comments.

The memory usage of the Service component of Ad-Aware 2007 has caused much debate, especially among the freeware users, who do not have access to the scheduling or real-time features. The service architecture is necessary as we begin to address emerging forms of malware and you can read more about this in the thread Regarding the Service on the Lavasoft Support Forums.

Despite the fact that most of this memory is willingly swapped to the Windows page file, we have - as a direct response to the multiple concerns caused by this issue - worked very hard to find ways of actively returning the memory to Windows whenever Ad-Aware 2007 is not in use.

With the release of version 7.0.2.3, we are happy to announce that the memory consumption of the Ad-Aware 2007 Service is vastly reduced whenever Ad-Aware 2007 is not running. We are sure you will appreciate the results!

But wait, there’s more! The software update also includes improvements of the real-time monitor, Ad-Watch. The performance of the updated version has been enhanced through general optimizations of the implementation, making it faster and more resource-friendly. These optimizations, together with the removal of bugs causing resource and memory leaks on some systems, should ensure a good Ad-Watch experience for everyone.

So guys hit your update button and get the latest verson now !!!!