Thank you Major

This weekend I discovered my beloved old wreck of a puter was stuffed full of nasty bugs and crappy stuff (including a worm and a trojan) (that will teach me to surf chinese websites( (Dont ask!) (ha ha ha)

I spent a day reading forums and stickys at this site and hopefully my machine is now bolted down tighter than a nuns fancy bits. Never before have I found so much s**t on my pc before... Stuff that spybot and avg couldnt possibly clean up and rid me of....Its been scanned, cleaned, massaged, exorcised, and hung out to dry, with the aid of the tutorials here, and the free software available and suggested by Mjr Geeks.

Gone is IE forever and Firefox now stands guard over my surfing, ccleaner did a fabulous job and so did some other programs and online scans.

I quite agree that some websites that offer free cleanup of your machine, get you to download and scan and then report outrageous virus and crap and then will only clean it off if you pay, is tantamount to blackmail! They are **** buggers for doing that!

Again thanks to MGeeks for finding me so much help and using the right programs.
I have been using spybot and AVG for many years, but since my upgrade to XP Pro (sp2) I decided to rely on windows firewall, tonight Im pleased to say I have my dear old friend Zonealarm back and XP F/wall kicked in to the dust.

Its alarming to watch Zone alarm click up possible intrusions like a clock timer. It was installed less that an hour ago and already it records 216 intrusions, 9 high rated. Its counting up literally by the second. Sure the XP F/wall may have blocked traffic, but one had no idea just how many, its this kind of reminder in Zone alarm that makes one realise just how much crap there is out there waiting to get inside your beloved porno mp3 playing document writing video coding playbox that we call a computer.
It seems to me they need a armed guard standing over the modem!
Thanks again to everyone here, hopefully I wont have to ask any dumb questions, but if I do, bear with me please.....

 

Glad MajorGeeks could assist you in your problems
Just make sure to check out thread on how to protect yourself from Malware
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=44525