Folks,

Dux:

Mr. Gates is a very busy man. I've also been calling him regarding the security flaws in Windows XP but so far without a reply. Perhaps he was busy calling you?

In hopes of destroying this hijacker code that has taken over my browser, last night I tried installing SpyBot from a CD. The installation went as expected. But when I attempted to run the program...nada. I found the virus had changed the attributes of the .exe file to RHSA making it useless and hidden. I had a devil of a time finding and changing that and even when I did it still would not run. I ran AVG for 9 hours over night and it only checked 300 objects in all that time and found nothing. I believe that AVG has been hijacked as well and that it only "appears" to be running.

Looks like a clean reinstall of XP is the only remaining option to finally rid myself of this meddlesome code. This being a DELL computer, I'm told that unless I can find the disks with all the hardware drivers on them I will have to find a way to download them off the Internet from some other computer. My friendly local computer Guru has generously offered to perform this service for me.

So it seems that we will be starting from scratch once again even after all our hard work in the past several days since my own computer crash. It will all be instructive of course. The smart always learn from their mistakes. Quite right, no one has ever accused me of being smart.

It may be difficult and it may take time but one day all will return to what passeth for normal around here. In the general scheme of things, as just one of many problems, it is really a minor worry anyway.