MicrostockGroup

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every "free" counter dumps adware and cookies on your visitor's PC. Why don't you use Google Analytics? No spyware, free, and much more info than just a counter.

I use Stat Counter

http://www.statcounter.com/

As far as I'm aware it doesn't dump any of those things on my computer and gives masses of information.

That's right ... most sites put cookies on your computer.

There's a simple way to deal with this.

Use Firefox as a browser (much better than IE) and set it to erase all cookies every time you shut the browser down.

Killing all cookies is killing the patient to cure a minor diseases. Cookies can make your life easier, like keeping settings. The problem is with third party cookies but you can selectively erase those with Firefox. With Firefox you can also adblock so that tracking cookies (which record your surfing behavior) even don't make it on your PC and you even don't see ads.

I wasn't talking about our own PCs but about the PCs of the visitors of your site. They can get loaded with tracking cookies if you don't watch out for which counter to take. For those on a server with php, you can insert some php code in your landing page that will keep a log file with statistics on your root folder on your server.