ZoneAlarm shuts down my DSL connection

You can get it at Best Buy.

When I first went to win2k I got hit with a sober and something else, and successfully used dedicated remover tools to get rid if them, one from symantec, the other from mccaffee. Of course the jerks are always looking for ways to defeat such tools, but if you careful and thorough there are some problems that you can survive without a paving job. But when in doubt, rip it out, fdisk and start over. This is another good reason for running your OS on one HD and all your programs on another, to reduce the work of such recovery.

Haven't heard of that before. Great idea. So the likelihood of getting something bad in your programs is nearly zero?

This shows, that you're using insecure tools, first your MUA, which is catastrophic (Outlook), second removal tools, which cannot fulfil their job.

Sober variants like W32/Sober-Z are loading code from the internet and executing this code. So a secure removal of all malware which was installed is not possible any more.

Very likely your box is still 0wned.

You really don't have a clue what you're talking about.

Yes. And it's the _only_ possibility to remove worms safely, which load code from the Internet.

Yours, VB.

This has nothing to do with it.

Yours, VB.

No idea if you can put a number on it, but it clearly improves the picture since many invasive programs are not aimed at multiple HD, and nowdays are almost all about setting up spam zombies, so they want primarily to spread from machine to machine quietly.

Another good trick is to put your OS on one partition (with nothing else there), and the swapfile on another where it is the only thing there. That way those should never become seriously fragmented, so you keep all that speed you are paying for, reduce defrag times, and scan times for maleware and disk problems.

Bullshit! The XP firewall is transparent to the user.

The real bullshit is that it is transparent to the attackers.

Perhaps then when I turned the firewall off and the windows immediately stopped popping up, something else produced that result.

Thanks, Volker. :)

schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

There is a M$ Hotfix available to correct the problem. Look for KB 831385 / Hotfix

John