Spybot-S&D

Are TeaTimer and blindman's exe files worth installing during the iinstall process.
The one I am really wondering about, greatly, is TeaTimer. Do you have to know a lot to work it and does it interfer with opening comman applications? Is this program really benefical at all (Teatimer)?

 

Spybot FAQ on Blindman.exe
What is blindman.exe for? FAQ #025 Some of you may have noticed a new file blindman.exe inside the Spybot-S&D folder, and have asked yourself what it is for.
In short words: it does nothing.

I guess an explanation is needed why a file that does exactly nothing comes with Spybot-S&D. Spybot-S&D offers a tool to control the System startup in its Tools section. This includes the ability to disable or enable startup entries from the Autostart group (found in your Start menu under Programs). This group contains links to the actual files. Windows stores those links as files with the extension .lnk. When Windows encounters a *.lnk file in that folder upon startup, it will start the linked application. Now the easiest way to disable those entries is to change the extension. The System startup tool of Spybot-S&D does simply change the extension .lnk to .disabled. This easily prevents the linked application from being started. But as Windows doesn't know this extension, this could slow the startup down. So Spybot-S&D does link that extension to blindman.exe. Windows now tries to run the .disabled file with blindman.exe - and as blindman.exe does exactly nothing, there's no slow-down in booting.

Some people have suspected it could even be spyware itself. For those I'll print the Delphi source code (blindman.dpr) here:
(The included resource file is blindman.res and contains just the icon and some version info)

program blindman;
{$R *.res}
begin
end.​

Anyone knowing a very small bit of programming should see that this program is totally harmless. Teatime info
ResidentTeaTimer Tools What is the Resident TeaTimer?

The Resident TeaTimer is a new tool of Spybot-S&D which perpetually monitors the processes called/initiated. It immediately detects known malicious processes wanting to start and terminates them giving you some options how to deal with this process in the future: You can set TeaTimer to:

- be informed, when the process tries to start again
- automatically kill the process
<li>- or generally allow the process to run There is also an option to delete the file associated with this process. In addition, TeaTimer detects, when something wants to change some critical registry keys. TeaTimer can protect you against such changes again giving you an option: You can either "Allow" or "Deny" the change. As TeaTimer is always running in the background, it takes some resources of about 5 MB.

Why does Resident TeaTimer terminate the application before asking?

Because threats like toll dialers are time critical - they cost from the first second they've connected. In order to protect you, these have to be terminated at the moment they appear before they can connect at all.

Why is the TeaTimer called "TeaTimer"?

As we used to forget our tea, when we let it brew, we built a small tool with a system tray icon to remind us. We called this tool "TeaTimer". When we started to develop the Resident tool for Spybot-S&D, we also needed a system tray icon for this. As we do not like having too many icons in the system tray, we decided to put both tools together and kept the name "TeaTimer". The next version of the Resident tool will also have the functions of the original "TeaTimer".

You can find the Resident TeaTimer in the tools section.

 

So does anyone actually recommend using TeaTimer? I got Zonealarm but does TeaTimer stop other spyware more efficently that can't be detected by Zonealarm? Lastly, does using this program slow down your CPU greatly (I know it says 5mb- but how does it feel when actually surfing-what is it a 2 or 10 second delay on loading a page?)

These are my real concerns.