Was i hacked or somthin......

Hi guys, I was just wondering somthin weird i noticed in my pc just last night. I was running registry mechanic and cleaned my registry, cleaned up cookies with ccleaner, ran deep scans with both ad aware and MS anti spy which just came up with the usual tracking cookies. But when i ran compression on registry mechanic i noticed the name value thing or whatever it is in the status tag show the word: SAM and it goes very fast. It is unusual because the only things that i usually see come up for that are a couple hkey things go through, then it goes through the users. I did recently update nero and after searching for the SAM thing in regedit, it came up with some unrecognizable stuff to me and then i saw somthing that said it was somthin for nero. The strange thing was that i updated my antivirus, (which is avast 4 home edition) which prompted a restart after updateing which i did not want to do untill i was done updateing everything on my computer. I was on aim while waiting for the downloads to come through as the nero files need a minute on my computer to come through and all of a sudden aim just stopped dead. And if i restart the program it would have just have become unresponsinve again. After the restart everything was fine though. I came here because i was not sure if i was hacked or what. Could i just be looking at a part of nero that was added from the update? I was just wondering what to do next. I think i will start by running trojan hunter and see if that gets me anywhere.
thanks
-the new tech guy

 

Well trojan hunter came up clean and I never noticed the file untill I updated nero. So your probably right that it is part of windows scince i have win2k installed on my computer with all updates. Also i notice no slowdowns. Im sure if somthing fishy was up I would notice right away when im using a old machine with a 600Mhz processor. So i think i am ok. Thanks for the help.
-the new tech guy