Over the weekend, I started testing a new (free) addition to my anti-spyware tech toolkit: X-RayPc. Here is X-block’s description from their Web site:

As the spyware versus anti-spyware battle rages on, we were looking for good tools that allow a user to examine the contents of his machine and to take corrective actions against those. An excellent candidate for this is “HijackThis” by Merijn, which is already in use by plenty of “anti spyware experts”. We felt that it HJT could be improved upon in some ways and thus the idea for X-RayPc Spyware Remover was born. We took the best parts of the HJT concept and linked it up to the SpywareGuide database. The result is something like a systems management tool with a built-in expert system.

I ran a side-by-side comparison of X-RayPc and HJT and did a line-by-line analysis of each program’s log (X-RayPc generates a “HiJackThis-compatible” log). Besides appearing to probe deeper into the system, X-RayPc also provides the file size and MD5 signatures for everything it locates. I’m not sure how much more help this will be. However, the real power of X-RayPc over HJT is in it’s ability to compare all entries to the online database and mark them accordingly.

I’ll be field-testing this utility further to see how it performs on severely-infected PCs and would be interested in hearing about your experiences with it.