Viz Vista by Ed Tittel

I've been using Spyware Doctor to handle spyware on my machine for over two years now, with great success in handling spyware. In the past three months, I have switched to PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus thanks to issues documented in my story "Best-of-Breed Apps Aren't Always Best for Vista" --namely, incompatibilities between AVG AntiVirus 8.0 and Spyware Doctor 6.0 that kept causing blue screens on my primary production machine.

In digging further into my BSOD from Thursday, August 7, using the Windows Debugger I observed that the ultimate cause was a module named pctsSvc.exe (see attached screenshot below). A quick process lookup informs me that this is part of PC Tools Spyware Doctor runtime environment. Additional research on Windows crashes related to this module indicates that a remove/reinstall maneuver often addresses the problem (see this PC Tools forum thread for more info).