There's an increasingly prevalent breed of malware, and spyware in particular, that's proving to be particularly hard to remove. Nasties such as Vundo are not only flooding machines with insecurities, pop-ups and scareware adverts to try to get you to buy applications, but they're also proving very difficult to eliminate.

In fact that's something of an understatement, as traditional spyware tools are struggling to keep the more virulent of these attackers at bay. As a result, more and more people are recommending utilising a collection of different tools to do battle with them, and in that collection, MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware gets a regular tip of the hat.

It's a fairly small application, with the trial download weighing in at under 3MB. Once downloaded, the installation itself is very quick, leaving you at a screen that invites you to both check for updates to the program and to launch it. We left both of them ticked and a quick pop-up window alerted us to the fact that if we wanted certain features, we needed the pro version. It's a mild nag, but we let it pass.

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Then it's straight on with the updates, which are as slimline as the main application. And before we knew it, we were at the main screen. There's little point in messing about, and the program rightly doesn't.

Anti-Malware boasts that it destroys malware one byte at a time, and it certainly gives you a thorough toolkit. The main tool you'll be using is the scanner, and this is available as both a quick and a more comprehensive search.

The quick search took less than eight minutes on the three PCs we tested it on (and we got it down to three on one of them), and picked up and quarantined quite a few items of malware in the process. It keeps you up to date with what it's doing, and at the end of the process presents a text log file of its search (this can be toggled, along with other facets of the program, in the options).

Elsewhere, you can elect to ignore certain routines that the program detects as malware and the current list of exceptions can always be viewed by clicking on the Ignore List tab at the top. Also, if you head over to More Tools, you'll find FileASSASSIN (their capitals, not ours), which is there to delete files that have become locked for some reason. It's not an everyday utility, but it's not a bad one to have handy.

The scans themselves we found effective, although on one of our test systems the software did have trouble permanently removing an instance of the aforementioned Vundo spyware. But that's where having a variety of applications to battle spyware helps. In conjunction with one or two good freeware applications it can form part of a formidable toolkit, and one that can combat the most virulent of malware.

One note: the aforementioned professional edition does address one key flaw with the application, in that it offers on-the-fly protection. Having an anti-spyware tool that springs into life only when you tell it to isn't a perfect scenario, and for fuller protection, the $25 asking price might be worth considering.

A tool with a deserved, growing reputation. And it's worth shelling out for the professional version, too.