Sorry about giving you bad information. I run 4 different scans every 2 weeks and I just finished running them. It's not AdAware that is reporting the 4-fold increase in the number of files scanned, it's Norton AV that has reported the increase in the number of files scanned from ~120,000 to ~468,000. Hope I have not wasted much your time. I'd still like to understand what's going on here. DRB