Earthlink said that scans of its users' computers revealed many "spyware" installations, according to AdWeek, but this third quarterly installment continues to lump many things, such as tracking cookies, into the category and suggest misleadingly that the problem is worsening quickly. Last April, the firm said that it found an average of 28 instances on each computer. This time around, measuring Q4 2004, it said it found a 14 percent decrease to 24 instances per computer. The gross number of instances found increased, however, as the study sample size increased from about a million computers to about 1.4 million computers. For the really dangerous stuff - keyloggers and trojans - Earthlink found, as in the previous quarter, about one infection for every three computers. Instances per computer of software that Earthlink calls Adware declined in the quarter from six per unit to 5 per unit.