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Hazard Shield is an anti-spyware program supposed to clean the existing malicious files on your computer and block new ones with the help of real-time protection.

At the first glance, the program has all it takes to successfully protect your system, as it also comprises an online updater to automatically retrieve new definitions on a regular basis.

Hazard Shield has a clean and easy to use interface, but the real problem is that some of the available tools aren’t exactly working as they should.

First of all, the scanner. There are three scan types at your disposal, namely smart, full and custom, with dedicated options to also check memory, registry, hosts files and heuristics. While each of these works flawlessly on Windows XP and Vista, the program crashes on Windows 7 every time you attempt to start a new scan.

The main window is also being used to display stats, so you can see the number of threats blocked in real-time or removed by scanner without jumping into any other screen.

The program can be updated manually or automatically at a user defined interval, while the real-time protection can monitor process execution and critical registry keys and values.

There’s a so-called “File Killer” option too to securely erase files, but this didn’t work during our test on a Windows 7 machine.

On the other hand, the program works smoothly on all the other Windows versions and needs just a moderate amount of hardware resources to do so.

Overall, Hazard Shield is a decent piece of software, but it still needs lots of improvements to provide the security level you are expecting.