It is sometimes difficulty to remove rogueware from a PC, as they may block legit antivirus software and important system tools from running on it while the rogue software is running.

RogueKiller is a free small program that analyzes the system for rogue software. It works in this regard similar to Fake Antivirus Remover, a program which we have reviewed in the past here on Ghacks. The program scans known rogueware locations, including running processes, the Windows Registry, drivers, the hosts file and the master boot record.

The following screen is displayed after you start the portable software.

The developer suggests to close all other programs running on the system before you start the program. First thing that you may want to do then is to scan the system. Just press 1 on the keyboard and hit enter afterwards to run the scan. This takes less than a minute, and a protocol is displayed as a text document afterwards.

This protocol lists relevant findings sorted by type.

The program detects dozens of rogue antivirus software including MicroVaccine, CheckSpeed, ProtectCop, SmartSafer or MicroPC. You may need to analyze the text file to see if the rogue software has modified core system settings and locations. The program ships with options to delete or repair some of them automatically. This includes options to delete Registry settings, fixing the host file and proxy setting, and fixing the domain namer server settings.

The software is fully portable and compatible with recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. You can download the latest version of Rogue Killer from the French developer website.

Smart UAC has been released recently and it did receive some praises from bloggers and is listed on several respected software portals like Softpedia which perform various checks on files before they are added to the portal itself.

Many users have shown skepticism about the program itself based on the previous programs developed by Security Stronghold.

The website itself for Smart UAC Replacement looks professional at first glance but sooner or later users will notice that the English on the product’s pages has not been written by a professional. It is far from perfect which would be understandable for a freeware or Open-Source project from a non-native speaker but the company apparently does not care that much about the language on their website.

A previous application of Security Stronghold with the name True Sword was classified by Symantec as “a Security Risk that may give exaggerated reports of threats on the computer. The program then prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats.”

It might be a coincidence that one of Smart UAC Replacement’s main features is a scan of running programs with a large database.

Smart UAC Replacement is a free product on the other hand and there are not any reports of users (yet) who were told to buy another product to get rid of a threat that Smart UAC Replacement found on the user’s computer.

The question remains, would you install Smart UAC Replacement?