I have found a script at xxwww.fixingtheweb.com which appears to block an entire country as dictated by you. This sure beats manually putting in all the ip ranges for a specific country which is what I am doing now and it is taking for ever. There are over 1200 ip ranges just for russia alone. Could be very useful if you know what you are doing.
I have also been reading a little on setting spider traps which will block malicious spiders that don’t obey your robots file. But again, this is down the road for me as one minor mistake and you block google and your up the creek. I will feel good when I have my htaccess file blocking the main countries known for spam. At least it is a start.