I am running XP home on a new computer for the last couple of months. Have a dial up connection and prior to a few days ago was using XP's firewall.
After downloading a critical update for IE 6 this weekend I now find that when I am online there appears to be constant activity showing on the network icon in the taskbar and when checking the status there is in activity. Now I don't know if this is related to the download or not. By the way this activity is going whether I have a program accessing the internet or not. This is not something I have seen before.
Turned off XP firewall and installed basic Zone Alarm. It reveals that the program accessing the internet is Generic Host Process Win32/svchost.exe.
I have tried turning it off which stops your access. I have tried allowing access but not as a server. This seemed to work but in the end did not.
Downloaded spybot and while it found a few things it was nothing serious but deleted what it found.
Run Norton AV 04 which finds nothing.
Any ideas?