MSN email settings keep changing back to allow SPAM

My girlfriend's almost three year old Dell Desktop machine, running WinXP, has recently developed a problem. She connects to the net via a 56K dialup. For the past 4 or 5 days she's been getting a lot of SPAM in her main MSN email box whereas before most of it was getting routed to her bulk mail folder. When she checked her MSN email settings she discovered that some of the boxes she had unchecked to insure that most SPAM would go to the bulk mail folder were now checked. (Checking the boxes in question allows the type of email described after each box to be routed to the user's main email inbox while unchecking a box is supposed to insure that the type of email described will be routed to the user's bulk mail folder. I trust I make myself obscure?!)

She once again unchecked those items/settings but after an hour or two upon examining them again she finds that they are once again checked which allows lots of SPAM to clutter up her "regular" (i.e. "wanted") email.

She has repeated this process about a half-dozen times over the past few days and each time the boxes she has unchecked in her email preferences are again checked when she examines the settings later.

She has up-to-date Norton AV signatures and a full NAV scan shows no problems. She updated her Ad-Aware signatures and ran a full scan and found nothing with that either. What should we try next? HijackThis? Some other anti-spyware/malware program? Anyone seen this specific problem before and know the best way to zap it?

She hasn't downloaded any new software nor installed anything from CD/DVD recently either. On the other hand she stopped updating Windows XP quite some time ago though I keep telling her that's not wise. (She did so because several updates screwed up her machine -- but as she now has a second hard drive for full system backups....etc, etc. I'll keep working on her on the Windows updates!)

I don't much like MSN as a net provider and she may switch to something else after the first of the year but for now she's got a problem using MSN and having to wade through and delete lots of SPAM from her main email inbox.

Thanks for any suggestions. Will be glad to provide more hardware and software details about her system if that may be helpful.

 

MSN email (Hotmail) is a web based email client. It is very likely not her machine that is the problem here; instead the problem is with Hotmail.

Your girlfriend really needs to bring her system up2date. Problems with Microsoft Updates are most often caused by viruses/malware. Using MS to keep your drivers up2date is not recommended, as more often than not the driver updates cause problems.

Fist do the following:

Please follow the steps below:

- Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support

Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.

- Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis