Is Winrar or 7zip quicker at unpacking RAR archives?

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A few points, fogman.

From earlier, you complained about Linux and its write access to NTFS. There's an inherent problem there. Linux does support write access, but cannot give a guarantee that it will always work. This is because NTFS is not an open standard. If Microsoft suddenly decides that setting a bit in a header somewhere suddenly means the entire structure changes, they can do that.

The current status of Spybot is really no different from any software. If you download it from a reputable site, it should be fine. When it was first released, there were a glut of people producing tampered versions of it (usually just via patches that changed its appearance - not a full-blown reverse engineer). I don't think that's happening much, any more.

Generally, your arguments about open source don't really work that way. Again, if you want to get a pre-built version of an open source product, get it from a reputable source.

The major argument in favour of the security of open source is not that YOU are going to look at the source code, to see if someone has sneaked a nasty trojan payload into it, but that a whole bunch of independent people, from around the world, WILL have looked at the code.

Sneaking code past that sort of scrutiny isn't anything like as easy as one fired employee of a company activating the evil code he put in their closed source product a few years previously - code which no one else in the company has ever even bothered to look at.

By employing DNS spoofing or man-in-the-middle attacks, a determined black-hat can easily redirect some unsuspecting user to a bogus webserver running a fake copy of Download.com, Tucows.com or even Sourceforge.net. Of course this is a bit paranoid, but nothing is secure in this world. That's why I prefer to google for the name of the developer and use some skill/intuition to work out if it's real.

And about the spywares, we can't forget that Windows is a system designed with non-technical people in mind. Security and ease of operation are things that cannot be together. That's why Windows has administrator/power-user accounts by default, a bunch of useless and dangerous services enabled, bad permissions in some folders, bad registry hardening, etc. Linux doesn't have spyware problems because its DEFAULT configuration is generally much more secure than the Windows' one.