Microsoft looking to fix spyware

Gates did say, however, that Microsoft is dedicating "hundreds of millions of dollars" of its $5 billion annual R&D budget toward solving the problems of "malware and adware." Although Gates says that he's never been victimized by a virus, his PCs have been riddled with spyware, forcing him to run third-party spyware scanners. "I haven't had a virus on my machine basically ever," he said.

SP2 did solve a lot of these problems. The two main fixes being the Internet Options tools to Manage Add-ons along with being able to reset search and home page settings. But the more work done on this the better.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft buys into this space or if they use the above R&D money to develop a wholly in house solution

More info on Paul Thurrott's Featured News.