How to enable/disable Spybot Tea timer

Spybot Search and Destroy – primarily a detection and removal tool, comes with a resident real time protection application called Tea timer. When activated it sits in the systray and monitors the system for malicious processes -which is in its detection library – currently 1173 processes – wanting to start and terminates them giving you some options.

In addition, Tea timer also monitors certain critical registry keys and alerts the user when a process, malicious or otherwise tries to change those keys. It also takes a snapshot of these registry keys at the time of system shutdown/restart or when you manually close the Tea timer and alerts you and restores the changes if any.

To activate (enable) Spybot S & D Tea Timer:

Start Spybot S & D, in the Menu, Select Mode and Click Advanced Mode

Click Yes in the confirmation dialogue box.

Now, in the left pane, click on Tools to expand the menu. Make sure that Resident is checkmarked in the right pane and then click Resident in the left pane.

In the right pane checkmark Resident "Tea timer" (Protection of over-all system settings\active.

Tea timer will now start and run from the systray . Henceforth it will start with Windows to alert you against any change to your key settings.

Here you can allow or deny the detected change and also opt to remember the particular change, so that every time this particular change is detected it will be automatically allowed or denied based on your first input.

To de-activate ( disable ) Tea timer:

At times you may need to disable Tea timer to facilitate proper cleaning of Malware using other utilities like HijackThis.

Right click the Tea timer icon in the systray and then click Settings.

This is the Black & White listed items that you have chosen to remember, that is to say that these lists are only populated by entries which you have chosen Tea timer to remember permanently, so that they are automatically dealt with.

Open all the four lists and delete the entries one by one. This will ensure that any bad change which was allowed previously will not be remembered when you restart Tea timer after cleaning the Malware.

To close Tea timer and to disable it from starting with Windows when you restart, open Spybot S & D, open the Tools menu on the right pane and click on Resident and uncheck Resident "Tea timer"(Protection of over-all system settings) active. Exit the program.

When Tea timer exits, it takes a snapshot of the registry keys it monitors and on its restart will attempt to restore the Registry keys to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken. There is a chance that the snapshot may include registry keys created by Malware unknown to Tea timer.

Finally restart your system to apply the changes.

How to Enable / Disable MS Anti-Spyware Real-time Protection