Character Builder Update Available

Mark had previously reported that he had encountered some problems when trying to level up his Cleric after he had installed the March 2, 2010, Character Builder (CB) upgrade. He had looked online and saw that the problem had also been seen by other users and had already been reported back to Wizards. I expected a bug fix upgrade at some point soon, but hadn't checked for a couple of days, and as I said it's available now. I downloaded the upgrade successfully and left Mark a text that the upgrade is available, figuring he could test it some time over the weekend.

As this is an interim upgrade it is not supposed to count against your upgrade/month limit. I spent ~30 minutes poking around wizards.com looking for some sort of official announcement about the release of the interim upgrade and couldn't find anything - but I guarantee it's in there somewhere. I did find a thread where several commenters were pleased that their Channel:Divinity problem was fixed, which was the problem Mark had encountered.

As a follow-up to my previous "Technical" post, after having got the new HD installed and the backup complete and after having written about it, later that evening I was poking around facebook.com and read where one of my friends was complaining about her PC occasionally getting bogged down, similar to the complaint I have with mine sometimes. Another tech-type spoke up and recommended spybot - search & destroy to go through and clean out whatever malware and spyware that it might find.

I am generally leery about these things, but it was free and I saw that it was available from cnet.com (Spybot link here) also, which I consider to be generally reliable, so I downloaded and installed it. The install and subsequent upgrade went pretty quickly, so I kicked off the full system scan and left to go to the store. It took about three hours to scan everything, but it found 108 (108!) malware and spyware entries on my PC. Some were just cookie files, but most were buried in my registry.

I run Norton Antivirus which has a spyware component to it, so I thought I was in pretty good shape. I told spybot to delete all 108 of the offending components ... it's only been a few hours since I cleaned it up and I haven't really noticed a significant performance improvement yet, but regardless I am happy to have all that crap removed. I haven't rebooted yet either, so I am not sure if that will make a difference. I am also not sure what happens if I encounter another malware/spyware download.